Effectiveness of structured teaching programme on knowledge regarding pelvic floor muscle exercises in prevention of urinary incontinence among premenopausal women admitted in selected hospital Bangalore

Urinary incontinence, loss of bladder control, is a common and often embarrassing problem which may have a profound impact on quality of life. Women in their premenopausal period may find pelvic muscles are simply weaker than they were before. These muscles may not have enough strength to hold the sphincters close and may cause unwanted leakage of urine. Pelvic floor exercises often also called kegel exercises after their originator, Dr. Arnold Kegel are widely promoted as the starting point for building pelvic floor strength. As urinary incontinence is not a life threating condition, quality of life takes precedence over other issues when deciding the therapy. Pelvic floor muscle education is a well acceptable therapy for urinary incontinence. Assessing patient's knowledge regarding pelvic floor muscle exercises in an effort to improve their quality of life may be a reasonable starting point.

It is quantitative quasi experimental research conducted among 40 premenopausal women who were admitted in St. Martha's Hospital Bangalore. Self-structured questionnaire was used to assess the knowledge on pelvic floor muscle exercises. The pretest was administered to control and experiment groups, followed by which post-test was done for the control group. Whereas the experiment group were given a Video Assisted Teaching Programme on Pelvic Floor Muscle Exercises and then administered a post-test.

The mean of pretest was 13.02 with standard deviation of 4.02 whereas the post-test mean score was 19.22 with the standard deviation of 3.62. The present study concluded there is an improvement in the knowledge level after the administration of Video Assisted teaching programme on pelvic floor muscle exercises and the study also revealed there is no association between the knowledge scores and the selected demographic variables (age, educational status and place of residence) and clinical variables (parity, type of delivery and urinary incontinence).