Educational Activity with Guatemalan Lay Midwives about Helping Babies Breath.

Area of Science:

• Global Health
• Maternal and Child Health
• Health Education

Background:

• Guatemala faces a high Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), ranking 17th globally in 2020.
• Lay midwives attend most home births but often lack formal education on neonatal resuscitation, specifically Helping Babies Breathe (HBB).
• This knowledge gap contributes to adverse neonatal outcomes in remote regions with poor health indicators.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the effectiveness of a culturally humble, oral educational intervention on HBB knowledge among lay midwives in Guatemala.
• To evaluate knowledge improvement using a pretest-posttest design in a remote, underserved area.

Main Methods:

• An educational activity focused on Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) was delivered orally in participants' native language.
• The intervention incorporated principles of cultural humility.
• Knowledge was assessed using a pretest-posttest methodology with demographic and quality improvement data collection.

Main Results:

• A statistically significant increase in HBB knowledge was observed from pretest (M=2.64) to posttest (M=4.22) (p=.0001).
• The study included 195 participants, demonstrating a robust improvement in understanding critical neonatal resuscitation techniques.

Conclusions:

• Oral education delivered in the native language, incorporating cultural humility, is effective for improving HBB knowledge in low-literacy populations.
• This approach holds significant potential for enhancing neonatal care and reducing infant mortality in vulnerable communities.