Relação entre o perfil sociodemográfico de gestantes e às lacunas de conhecimento sobre aleitamento materno

Abstract

Introduction: Providing exclusive breastfeeding brings benefits to the mother and baby, it is known that knowing about breastfeeding can influence the success of this phase of breastfeeding. In Brazil from 1986 to 2020 there was a 22.7% increase in the breastfeeding rate of children in the first year of life, although Brazil is still below ideal. Objective: To evaluate the knowledge about breastfeeding in pregnant women attended at the Centro de Referência à Saúde da Mulher (CRASM); to trace the profile of pregnant women attended at the Centro de Referência à Saúde da Mulher; identify the factors that generate gestational risk and identify the difficulties of pregnant women in relation to the theme of breastfeeding. Methods: This is an exploratory, descriptive, documentary, cross-sectional and quantitative research. Number of the opinion of the Research Ethics Committee: 5,163,442, approved on December 14, 2021. The sociodemographic profile of pregnant women was traced and the KNOWL questionnaire was applied, the only instrument validated in Brazil capable of evaluating the knowledge of pregnant women about breastfeeding. This is the first research in the country using this instrument. Results: When profiling these pregnant women, most of them were brown 70.51% (n= 55), married 44.87% (n= 34), with complete high school 42.31% (n= 33), were under low gestational risk prenatal care 65.38% (n= 51) and had at least one child born alive 65.38% (n= 51). It was possible to relate the knowledge about breastfeeding with the level of education, because women with complete higher education were the ones who scored best in the questionnaire. The results indicate that the women in this study have an average of 78.04% knowledge about breastfeeding. Final considerations: Through these findings, it is important that health professionals continue their training to maintain a quality prenatal care with satisfactory results such as those of this research, so that women continue to have a good rate of knowledge about AM.