Using of health belief model to promote preventive behaviors against iron deficiency anemia among pregnant women

Iron deficiency anemia is one of the most common nutritional problems during pregnancy. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of education based on health belief model to promote preventive behaviors against iron deficiency anemia among pregnant women. The study was performed on 80 pregnant women that were randomized equally into the experimental and control groups. A self-administered questionnaire based on health belief model constructs was applied to gather data. The experimental group received two educational sessions. The mean age of women was 27.96±5.6 years and mean gestational age was 16.6±1 weeks. Before the intervention, no significant differences in terms of demographic characteristics and health belief model constructs were found between the groups, while after the intervention, the scores of health belief model were different significantly between the control and experimental groups . Since the results of the study indicated the applicability of health belief model to promote nutritional behavior in regard to anemia in pregnancy, implementing health belief model based educational sessions in health centers is suggested to reduce complications of this problem.