Perinatal Care in Women with Vision Disorders: a Systematic Review

Objective:Maternal healthcare providers are usually unfamiliar and not adequately educated to cover the special needs of women with vision impairment during the perinatal period. Moreover, maternity clinics and hospitals may not be able to provide appropriate support based on the distinct needs of women with vision disorders. A systematic review was conducted with the aim to investigate the gap between those women's particular needs and the health services provided to them as well as the overall barriers that arise during perinatal care of women with vision disorder. Material and methods:We searched for peer-reviewed articles published in any language in two online databases, Medline and Scopus, using the following keywords: "perinatal care", "perinata*", "wom*", "vision disabilit*", "vision disorder*", "visual disorder*", "visual impairment", "blindness". Articles were selected based on four inclusion criteria: (a) studies published over the last ten years, (b) primary researches and conference papers, (c) studies in English language, and (d) adult patient population. Results:A total of 33 studies via Medline and 177 studies via Scopus were initially identified as relevant, but eventually, only three articles were found to meet all inclusion criteria. A systematic analysis of these three studies mainly showed that (a) pregnant women with vision disorders expressed lack of satisfaction for the quality of perinatal care that they received; (b) both hospital facilities and healthcare staff approaches were found incompatible with the specific functional needs of these women; (c) maternity care professionals' training and attitudes need to be modified in order to meet those needs. Conclusion:It is crucial to note that the limited number of relevant studies found by us, which demonstrates by itself the need to conduct more studies in order to draw clearer and safer conclusions. Consequently, more research is required to evaluate how compatible with the functional needs of women with vision disorder the employed maternal healthcare interventions during the perinatal period really are. This would in turn improve perinatal outcomes for both the women and their families.