The effect of COVID-19 vaccine tele-educational program on vaccine hesitancy and receiving the vaccine among women planning for pregnancy, pregnant or breast-feeding mothers.

Background: COVID-19 hesitancy among women planning to become pregnant, who are pregnant, and who are breast-feeding is still a global phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is a lack of national educational programs that provide those groups of people with the information they need about the vaccine.
Objective: This study investigated the effect of the COVID-19 vaccine tele-educational program on vaccine hesitancy and receiving the vaccine among women planning for pregnancy, pregnant and breast-feeding mothers.
Methods: This study implemented a quasi-experimental pre-post design and was conducted in Jordan. It was a two-time study and had two groups of women; 220 women participated in the control group, and 205 women participated in the intervention group (those received the tele-educational program). All participating women answered the demographic characteristics sheet and the Arabic version of Hesitancy About COVID-19 Vaccination Questionnaire twice.
Results: Results showed that after conducting the program the interventional group reported significantly higher vaccination rate and lower mean score of hesitancy than the control group (M = 24.67, SD = 5.11; M = 27.45, SD = 4.92; respectively) t (423) = -4.116, p-value < 0.001. Moreover, before the program, women in the intervention group reported significantly higher levels of hesitancy compared to those in the same group after the program (M = 28.35, SD = 4.91; M = 24.66, SD = 5.11; respectively) t (204) = 17.83, p-value < 0.001.
Conclusions: The study concluded that awareness of pregnant women after being given the tele-education program about COVID-19 vaccination decreased their hesitancy and improved their willingness to participate in the COVID-19 vaccination. Therefore, health workers should focus on providing scientific-based information about the vaccine to reduce the doubts of pregnant women about participating in the COVID-19.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Momani et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)