Modifying a childbirth education curriculum for two specific populations

An interdisciplinary care provider team conducted a nonexperimental, observational, descriptive study to determine a childbirth education curriculum that would meet the needs of pregnant adolescent and substance-using women who attend prenatal clinics at an urban, municipal hospital center. A childbirth education curriculum, originally taught to a clinic population in 1974, was used with the two special populations in 1993 for a 7-month period. Participants were encouraged to provide feedback about the curriculum for each class by offering suggestions for additions or deletions of content Provider staff also evaluated the content for applicability today. At the end of the study period, the pregnant adolescent group had been most involved with the class exercises; members of the group provided feedback about content. They were consistently positive in evaluating the entire six-class curriculum and recommended some additional topics. The adolescents demonstrated sustained interest in breast-feeding. The substance-using women, on the other hand, expressed a preference for content that focused on labor and birth; they preferred to ask questions, individually and in the privacy of the examining room, and showed negligible interest in breast-feeding.