CONSTRUCTION AND USE OF THE BIRTH PLAN FOR USERS OF A CHILDBIRTH SUPPORT GROUP IN A HEALTH CENTER

Introduction and Objective: Pregnancy and childbirth are physiological events permeated by social and cultural aspects. The institutionalization of delivery care improved mother and children mortality rates, but many interventions related to it proved unnecessary, invasive and harmful. Prenatal care and childbirth support groups can encourage women to build a Birth Plan (BP), document in which they write their wishes and beliefs for birth from the best available evidence. The objective is to understand the BP building process by women who participated in a childbirth support group, the presentation of the BP at the hospital, and also the perception of women about how it was received by the staff. Method: Qualitative study of women in the primary care network of Florianópolis-SC who participated in the Childbirth Support Group during their pregnancy. Semi-structured interviews were done, and were analyzed by the Bardin content analysis’s method. Results and Conclusion: Seven women were interviewed, six of them wrote the BP and four had shown it at the birth moment. The women reported the importance of building the document which helped them feel more confident and secure. One of the interviewed who presented the document at the hospital said that its acceptance was professional-dependent. The construction of the BP should be encouraged to pregnant women as a way of health education and empowerment for childbirth. It is believed that the more women write and present the BP at the moment of birth, the more professionals’s care will hear the needs of the population served.