Effect of CNPG for Preventing and Reducing Nipple Crack in Postpartum Mothers at Ramathibodi Hospital

Painful and cracked nipples are most common problems associated with breastfeeding. It has been insufficient to demonstrably minimize these common reasons for the failure to initiate or continue successful breastfeeding. This quasi-experimental research aims to compare the scores of nipple pain and the level of cracked nipple between the control group and the experiment group. The purposive sampling was recruited from the postpartum women who had normal delivery, no contraindication for breastfeeding in the obstetric ward at Ramathibodi Hospital during December 2014 - January 2015. All participants were equally classified into 2 groups. The first 35 postpartum women were assigned to the control group and cared by the conventional nursing intervention, while the rest 35 postpartum women were assigned to the experimental group and cared by the Clinical Nursing Practice Guideline (CNPG) for preventing and reducing nipple crack in addition to the conventional nursing intervention. Measuring tools consisted of 1) The clinical nursing practice guideline for preventing and reducing nipple crack. The content validity was examined by three experts; and 2) Pain assessment using the Numerical Rating Scale (NRS). 3) The level of nipple crack was observed by the check list form. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistic, Mann-Whitney test, and Fisher’s Extract Test. Results demontrated that there was no significantly different in characterictic between experiment and control groups. At day1 and day 2 after delivery, the experiment group had significantly lower nipple pain scores than the control group (P = .001). However, there was no significantly different level of nipple crack between the control and the experiment groups. The results of this study support that the CNPG is certainly helpful for preventing and reducing nipple pain and nipple crack. It should be further developed this CNPG for preventing and reducing nipple crack to promote continuity breastfeeding in other settings of Thailand.