Funding outcome

Immigrant women are reported to have lower levels of satisfaction of prenatal care and higher rates of pregnancy complications when compared to Canadian born women. They experience increased chance of preterm delivery, low infant birth weight, delivery by Caesarean section, and increased chance of postpartum depression. These results are partly thought to be due to to the language barriers in accessing accurate and relevant information regarding prenatal care and difficulties in communicating with healthcare staff. In hopes of providing immigrant women accessible and accurate information, and to assist physicians in better helping their patients, we are developing a prenatal care informational website in multiple languages. We are first creating an English and an Arabic version to specifically work with the Somali population in Edmonton. To create the best resource possible, we plan to study the effectiveness of the website and to determine areas of improvement according to the Somali women. The study will consist of two online surveys, before and after the use of the website with questions on the topics of events during pregnancy and delivery. The data will be collected and the pre and post survey results will be compared to assess the effectiveness of the resource. The participants will be recruited through Mom Care Docs, which is staffed by family physicians who perform low-risk obstetrics, and through the Immigrant Women's Network. The goal is to identify gaps in areas of knowledge about prenatal care, which will inform areas of improvement of this online resource. We plan to use the results from this research to improve the website in providing accessible information to immigrant women, thus ultimately having the potential of improving pregnancy outcomes of these women.