Challenges and prospects of digital technologies in increasing the prevalence and duration of breastfeeding

• Olga D. Rudneva
• Celebi G. Gagaev
• Victoria A. Pertseva

Abstract

Aim. To evaluate the possibility of raising the level of awareness of pregnant and lactating women on the rational organization of breastfeeding through a public information chat in the Internet messenger.

Material and methods. The information for analysis was obtained through an electronic survey of 735 pregnant and lactating women on the Internet using a specially designed scoring questionnaire from April to July 2022.The work was performed at the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Medicine of the Faculty of Continuous Medical Education of the Medical Institute of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia.

Preparation and technical processing of the material was performed using the MS Office 365 software package. For statistical processing of the study results, the STATISTICA 8.0 program from StatSoft Inc. was used.

Results. A high level of knowledge was demonstrated by 62.7% of the respondents; no statistically significant dependence of the lactation period at the time of the survey on this trait was found. At the same time, a direct moderate highly significant relationship was found between the number of points scored and the duration of stay in the chat (R=0.3, p<0.01) and the number of correspondents with a high level of knowledge and the duration of stay in the chat (R=0.2, p<0.01). The awareness of pregnant women about the organization of breastfeeding is statistically significantly less than that of lactating women. One month of presence in the chat is sufficient for the appearance of statistically significant differences in the specified parameters. There were no significant differences in the number of points scored and the number of respondents demonstrating a high level of knowledge between breastfeeding women with any lactation duration at the time of the survey.

Conclusion. Public chats for breastfeeding support in Internet messengers, the functionality of which allows both posting thematic informational articles and conducting additional brief individual consultations, are an effective and resource-saving tool for increasing the prevalence and duration of breastfeeding.

Keywords:breastfeeding; digital technologies; individual consultations for nursing mothers

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