Awareness and Utilization of Menstrual Cup among Adolescent Nursing Students of a Selected College.

Abstract

Introduction: Menstruation is normal physiological process of a woman, during this period basic hygiene and care is most important. Most of the women use sanitary napkins and pads for maintaining menstrual hygiene, though menstrual cup is a good alternative to sanitary pads as it is reusable and environment-friendly. Awareness of nursing students about this will have significant clinical and public health implications. Hence, the current research aimed at assessing awareness and utilization of menstrual cup among adolescent nursing students.  Methods: Analytical cross-sectional research design was conducted among 121 adolescent nursing students selected by enumerative sampling from Nepalese Army Institute of Health Sciences, College of Nursing and Nepali Army college of Health Science. Semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation was used to describe the socio-demographic characteristics and inferential statistics i.e., spearman rank correlation was used to find out the correlation between level of awareness and utilization of menstrual cup. Results: In this study, majority (81%) of the respondents had moderate level and only (14%) of respondents had adequate level of awareness on menstrual cup. Very few respondents (9.1%) of them had used menstrual cup. There was negligible positive correlation between level of awareness and utilization of menstrual cup (r=0.003). Conclusion: The findings of the study concluded that nursing students have moderate knowledge regarding menstrual cup and its usage and only very few of them are using it hence, there is a need for educational programs, campaigns and continuous monitoring to improve and reinforce the knowledge regarding menstrual cup and its usage among students as they are the one who in future will reach to serve the public and raise awareness throughout the country.