A Self-Help Intervention for Chinese Women Undergoing IVF Treatments during Their Result Awaiting Period

Background and Purpose: Many couples with infertility resort to in-vitro Fertilization (IVF), a common mean of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) to pursuit their dream of parenthood. However, the invasive, time-consuming and expensive treatment often caused psychological and bodily distress to the women. Throughout all the treatment stages, the women’s anxiety level was found to peak at the result awaiting period. However, they often stayed at home in the period without accessing external assistance when they had already gone through the active treatment. Thus, this study developed a self-help intervention model which was aimed at reducing their anxiety level during the specified period, so that they could also receive psychological support at home.

Methods: The self-help intervention adapted the framework of Integrated Body-mind-spirit model (I-BMS), which aims at achieving dynamic balancing in physical, psychological and spiritual aspects. Women who were going to undergo IVF treatment were recruited to join the intervention. The intervention group was composed of a three-hour workshop teaching bodily skills and a self-help exercise book with spiritual stories for home reading, while the control group only got the health information. Each participant was invited to complete as set of questionnaire consisting the Chinese version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (C-STAI) before and after the intervention. The results were analyzed by ANOVA in SPSS.

 

Results: The preliminary data of 42 women was gathered and analyzed. The women who had participated the workshop and adopted the self-help intervention at home showed significant reduction in anxiety (T1=89.00+13.76, T2=84.32+13.60, p<0.05), while the control group showed significant increase in anxiety during the result awaiting period in contrast (T1=86.42+22.64, T2=94.32+26.78, p<0.05). The self-help intervention was proven to be effective in alleviating the women’s anxiety level.

Conclusions and Implications: The self-help intervention was found effective in alleviating the anxiety of the women undergoing IVF treatment as evident by the results findings. It shed light on the development of psychological services to the infertile women, which was currently under-developing in Hong Kong. It also provided a new perspective of the mean of psychological support which was lower cost, flexible and easily accessible. Continuous effort would be put on the study for further expansion. (This study is funded by GRF, HKU27400414).