Educational Alternatives, Volume 20, 2022

Abstract: There are vast researches on the health literacy of whole populations as well as researches focused on particular groups. But there is still a group, whose levels of the health literacy are concealed - mothers in puerperium. Puerperium is a turbulent period, mothers not only need to cope with all the physical changes after delivery, but also with all the psychical challenges, new social roles and very demanding new task represented by caring of a new human being. Women in this period may lack help and information, as the provided information address much more to pregnancy and delivery and just a little to the puerperium. This article presents the results of a small research which was carried out a in the hospital in Svitavy, the Czech Republic. It shortly describes the phenomenon of health literacy and puerperium. General health literacy was examined by the EU-16 standardized questionnaire. The final number of participants was 103, the research was conducted from November 2020 to February 2021. In both fields, mothers had showed adequate levels of health literacy, however, the results are still far from excellent. These results indicate the need for continual exploration of health literacy, creating better conditions for women in puerperium for their self-development and finding the optimum ways for motivating women in puerperium to deepen and extend the level of their health literacy by different manners - for example: antenatal courses, cooperation with field midwives or studying of literature which should be created for these purposes.