What Do Women Want? Looking Beyond Patient Satisfaction.
Deborah McCarter, Carrie E MacLeod
PMID 31672402WHAT IT FOUND
Women and nurses described different postpartum discharge priorities.
Women wanted emotional and physical support, help with newborn feeding and fear of inadequate care. Nurses prioritized safe sleep, breastfeeding, self-care, and time and staffing barriers.
Key findings
01Women wanted individualized attention to both emotional and physical postpartum care.
02Nurses focused discharge education on safety, including safe sleep, breastfeeding, maternal self-care, and barriers such as time and staffing.
03Experienced mothers said they still needed help and asked nurses not to assume they were ready.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study used a convenience sample from one small hospital in the Northeast, so the themes may not apply to other settings. Only 24 parents and 16 nurses took part, and funding limited how many groups could be held, so data saturation was likely not reached. Prenatal and postpartum respondents were sometimes in the same groups because scheduling was difficult, so the findings do not separate those periods clearly. The study reports perceptions and priorities; it did not test a discharge education method or measure maternal or infant outcomes.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these themes as proof that changing discharge teaching improves postpartum outcomes. The study asked a small group of women and nurses at one hospital what they thought and wanted. It did not test an intervention or measure maternal or infant outcomes.