Project leads
Dr. Julia von Sommoggy
Prof. Dr. Barbara Fillenberg
Project staff
Julia Steinmann
Locations
Institute for Social Medicine and Health Systems Research, Magdeburg
Midwifery Science, University Medicine Mainz
Health literacy-oriented counselling for early childhood allergy prevention by midwives: participatory development of an intervention.
Midwives work closely with their women and families and also visit them at home. This allows them to get to know the families’ living environments. Although this provides them with a great deal of knowledge about the individual needs of the families, they can only be successful in their role as counsellors for early childhood allergy prevention if they can also take into account the health literacy (HL) of the women and families they accompany. The results of our qualitative study indicate that their knowledge is often not sufficient to be able to apply sustainable counselling strategies for health literacy and early childhood allergy prevention (ECAP). This is because existing interventions for HL-oriented counselling between healthcare professionals and patients are not yet aimed at (expectant) midwives. Midwives therefore need tools to be able to check and promote the level of knowledge of families as well as to provide tailored health literacy-orientated and allergy prevention advice.
Study objectives
The objectives of this project are to explore:
In order to develop an intervention, the barriers and facilitators of HL-oriented counselling for early childhood allergy prevention by midwives will first be explored in more detail. Subsequently, an intervention will be developed in a participatory manner with midwives and midwifery students at the Regensburg and Mainz sites, which will then be piloted and evaluated.
The project is divided into four phases:
- Collection of quantitative data:
A quantitative questionnaire on practices, barriers and facilitators in HL-oriented allergy counselling will be used to collect data as a basis for intervention development. - Participatory intervention development:
In co-design workshops with midwives and other stakeholders, the question of how midwives can be strengthened to provide HL-oriented counselling on allergy prevention and other health topics will be explored. - Finalisation of the intervention by the researchers:
All data collected up to this point will be collated and used to develop an intervention and associated materials within the research team and with didactic experts. - Piloting and evaluation of the intervention:
The intervention will be piloted with various target groups (students, practising midwives). Participants will be surveyed using semi-standardised qualitative interviews and a questionnaire in order to evaluate and, if necessary, adapt the intervention.
The WP Healthcare professionals is located in the healthcare context. It is linked to the WP Living systematic reviews, which provides the research evidence that is also relevant for WP Health professionals. WP Doing Health and WP Epidemiology provide insights into the ECAP practices of parents, which are taken into account in the development of interventions. The results from WP Health Professionals are compared with the results from WP User Needs.