Abstract

Congenital heart diseses, are chronic illness in infants & children. This research is a quasi-exprimental study investigating the impact of education on home care knowledge of sixty mothers with children undergoing heart surgery. Data collection consisted of a pretest, posttest and retentional questionnaire that contain of demographic data of mother & her baby and multiple choice test relate to heart diseases, surgical treatment, complication and home care of babies. The mothers gained a positive mark for true answer, a negative mark for a false answer and a zero mark for an unknown answer. Data collection was conducted in before admission of babies, one week and one month after discharge. As for the case group teaching programs consisted of educational vido films and a face to face teaching and educational booklet. For the data analysis a spss package & descriptive statistic were employed. To identify the level of mother's knowledge, mother's mark were classified as, good-moderate and weak. The result obtained showed that at pretest. the subjects in the case group did not have a good level. As for the control group only 6.7% were evaluated as good level at pretest. At posttest and retentional phases scors increased to 100 and 96.7% respectively for the case group. Regarding the control group 6.7% were evaluated as good and dropped to zero at the retentional stage. However, comparsion of the mean score at the posttest and retentional in both groups, showed a a decrease of knowledge overtime. In conclusion the results of the present study significantly supports the impact of education on improving the knowledge of mothers on providing a better home care for children undergoing heart surgery.