Effect of acupressure on labour pain during first stage of labour among Primi mothers in a selected hospital of Delhi

Abstract

The study aimed to assess the degree of pain during labour in experimental and control groups before and after intervention and to compare the pain score during labour between the experimental and control groups after intervention. This experimental pre-test and post-test control group study was conducted on 60 primi mothers (30 each in experimental and control group) in Swami Dayanand Hospital, Delhi. The mean post-test pain score of control group (8.23) was higher than mean pre-test pain score (7.13) with a mean difference of 1.1 and standard deviation of 2.22. The obtained t-value (3.98) was higher than the t-value of 2.04 at df (29) at 0.05 level of significance. The mean post-test pain score in experimental group was 6.17 and mean post-test pain score of control group was 8.23 with a mean difference of 2.06 and standard deviation of 1.10. The t-value computed at 2.41 was more than the t-value of 2.00 at df (58) at 0.05 level of significance. The results indicate that Acupressure at point Li4 was effective in reducing the pain in experimental group. The findings suggest that the non-pharmacological method of pain relief measure like acupressure at point Li4 was effective in reducing labour pain in experimental group and in the control group it was found that pain was increasing as no intervention was done.