Pnm-11: The Role of Health informatics, Nurses and Midwives on Education in Reproductive Health and Prenatal Care

Background: Employing informatics in the health care systems can improve the quality of health care through the effective use of information systems. Health informatics is potentially a powerful and dynamic method for providing health education. Reproductive health is a necessary part of health for individuals, couples and families. It deals with different features of health care, such as: improving antenatal, prenatal and postpartum care; providing high quality services for women including infertility; reducing unsafe abortion; preventing sexually transmitted infections and treating of reproductive tract infections. Women’s health and reproductive health complement each other and deal with comparable subjects regarding women. Information technology has initiated to take its place in the field of women’s health. The use of the Internet and the World Wide Web in health education has been extensively reported. Women – as health informatics clients- are more frequently visiting the Internet for health information. The prenatal period is one of the issues associated to women’s health. Additionally, the prenatal period has a wide range of events through three phases of the reproductive cycle, which can be included in the educational materials. Such uses of health informatics in health education in the area of women’s health can decrease prenatal, maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. There are many reliable World Wide Web resources for prenatal care that are appropriate both for health care providers and for clients as a method of health promotion and education. Although it is necessary to guide the consumers of health informatics to high quality information and to instruct them how to assess the reliable and valid educational resources. However, applications of health informatics in prenatal care for clients have not been stated widely through the research studies and projects. While, health informatics has been used for other topics of health education and they have been effective for the consumers. It has been realized that health education does not affect people automatically, although they are loaded with information. There are other rich formats for providing health education, and Libraries of videos, interactive educational simulations and even games may be preferred ways of information dissemination. Teleconferencing is a good example of convergence of technologies and is effectively a means for communication education. It provides learning to large groups, which are geographically scattered and reduce resultant cost benefit with in terms of time and traveling. There are some limitations for applying information technology in the consumers’ health education generally and in the prenatal area particularly. Including the computer literacy of the consumers, funds, cultural awareness and population distribution, all of which have great effect on the application of information technology in prenatal care patient’s education. Nurses and midwives are the members of the health care team who are most responsible for the education of women, a role they perform besides their task of direct patient care in order to improve the quality prenatal care. It is specific duty of health care providers to keep their knowledge up to date and enhance the cultural awareness and education of patients and guide the patients to the appropriate resources of education. Cultural awareness education is considered to be the first building block toward women’s safety