Patient's knowledge level about intrauterin device application

Abstract

Objective: Beside the improvements in family planning methods and their accessibility, unwanted pregnancies are one of the important public health problems. Main causes of these problem are insufficient knowledge of people about family planning and misusage of methods. Many of the studies revealed that counseling services couldn’t provide adequate information about appropriate choice of methods and selection of methods are done unconsciously.

Methods: This descriptive study was carried on 201 consecutive women attended to Pendik Family Planning Center during MayAgust 2012 for Intra Uterine Device (IUD) application. Before giving consultation about family planning, all members of the study were invited to complete our questionnaire face to face. Data were analyzed with SPSS 16.0 programme.

Results: The mean age of the women was 32.32±7.95 years. Most of the women were married for 10 year or more (66.2%). 46.3% of the women were using modern family planning methods (oral contraceptives, preservative, etc.) before IUD. The most frequent cause to give up the present method was reliability (n=141, 70.1%) of IUD. Moreover partner’s desire was an important factor in condom users (p<0.05). In this study, it is showed that; women don’t have sufficient knowledge about the application, follow up and controlling processes of IUD.

Conclusions: This study shows that women attending Family Planning Center do not have adequate knowledge about IUD. This result is in concordance with the previous studies in the literature. Although most of the women knew rare side efects of IUD, they didn't know mechanisms of action, effectivity and follow up procedures and this could be the reason of limited usage of IUD. In conclusion population based education programmes are needed for increasing the knowledge about family planning method.