Abstract:

This study was conducted to determine whether women's health literacy has an effect on breastfeeding and delivery. The type of the study was cross-sectional and the sample size was 318 women. Data were collected using the “Descriptive Information Form” and “Adult Health Literacy Scale (AHLS)”. Permission was obtained from the ethics committee, district governor, scale owner and women for our research. Numerical and percentile distribution, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test were used in the statistical analysis of the data. The average age of women is 37.68±6.41 (min=25, max=49). 96.9% of women are married and 51.9% of them are primary school graduates. 24.2% of women are primiparous and 75.8% are multiparous. The rate of those who had a normal delivery was 46.5%, and the rate of those who had a cesarean delivery was 53.5%. 45.0% of women stated that they received breastfeeding training from a health personnel. The women's total AHLS score was found to be 10.19±5.68. The ratio of women's total AHLS score to the number of living children (p<0.001), miscarriage (p=0.006), curettage (p=0.006), breastfeeding education (p=0.000), and breastfeeding in the first hour (p=0.000) significant difference was found. In addition, there was no statistically significant difference between the women's total AHLS score and delivery type (p=0.482). The results of the study showed that health literacy in women had an effect on starting breastfeeding in the first hour, but had no effect on the mode of delivery.

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