Knowledge of Daily Fetal Monitoring Chart among Antenatal Women

Motherhood is a boon for every woman to be adorned. Pregnancy does not always end the right way. Sometimes even before you could feel the baby inside, you lose it and more painful you feel a life inside but may never see it, breathe life outside. Nature allows a mother herself to get to know that her baby is all well. Every baby's flutter felt by the mother between 16’th to 20’th week of pregnancy is the sign. So counting these flutters through daily fetal monitoring chart (dfmc) would aid many women live their dreams of motherhood.

1. To assess the existing knowledge of antenatal women regarding daily fetal movement chart (dfmc) 2. To determine the association between knowledge and selected sample characteristics.

A quantitative descriptive survey method was adopted to collect data from 60 antenatal women visiting the selected hospital who were selected by non probability convenient sampling technique. Self administered structured knowledge questionnaire (r’=0.84) was used for the same. The collected data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

The findings of the study reveal that 70% of the antenatal mothers had inadequate knowledge, 30% had moderate knowledge and none of them had adequate knowledge. There was a significant association between the knowledge scores with parity and education at 0.05 level, whereas no association was computed between knowledge scores with age, occupation, weeks of gestation and previous source of information.

The present study findings concluded that nearly three-fourth of the antenatal women had inadequate knowledge, just a little more than quarter had moderate knowledge and none of the mothers had adequate knowledge regarding daily fetal monitoring chart (dfmc). There is an urgent need to make the general public aware of the simple antenatal diagnostic measure which would indirectly bring down the statistical figures of stillborn and IUFD (Intra Uterine Fetal Death) drastically.