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Aim: The purpose of this research is to analyze the opinions of nurses, midwives, and physicians who work in obstetrics hospitals and clinics toward mother-friendly practices.
Method: This is a cross-sectional research completed between September –October, 2014 in obstetrics and gynecology units of publicly owned hospitals’ in Aydin and Muğla city centre. The research includes a random sampling of 105 nurses, midwives, and physicians. Data was gathered through nurse, midwife, and physicians’ identifying characteristics, questionnaire that asked about their beliefs on natural birth and mother-friendly practices. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, variance analysis, t-test, Mann–Whitney U, Kruskal–Wallis H, and Bonferroni Corrected Mann–Whitney U tests.
Results: The average age of the nurses, midwives, and physicians within the research sample was 39.23±7.60, their work experience in obstetrics field 11.29±8.48 years, 92.1% of the participants were women and 41.0% of them were bachelors level graduates. 75.2% of the participants knew the description of natural birth, 79.0% of whom stated that natural birth is not practiced in our country. The women’s lack of education on natural birth practices, the fear of pain during natural birth, and lack of appropriate physical conditions are cited as the reasons why there is a lack of natural birth practices in our country. The participants’ opinion score on mother-friendly birth practices average is found to be 54.00±7.15 (range: 36–66). Because of having a more positive opinion; bachelor level graduates, midwives, and nurse’s opinion scores were statistically found higher.
Conclusion: The research has found that the nurses, midwives, and physician’s opinions on motherfriendly practices are positive. This result can help with the widespread acceptance of natural birth practices, further development of mother-friendly birth practices and therefore contributing to the improvement of the mother and baby’s health.