Soad A. Ramadan¹, Amira R. Said^1,

Background: Nowadays, infertility is considered as a social concern which can lead to the couples’ psychological imbalance, relationship disturbance and divorce. Sexual satisfaction is mainly affected by the consequences of infertility, such as decrease of self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and sexual relationship with failure in reproduction. Aim: was to evaluate the effect of an educational intervention on infertile women’ knowledge, practices and attitude regarding natural fertility methods and it is effect on female sexual function. Research design: A quasi experimental design was used. Setting: The study was carried out in the Gynecology clinic at Benha University Hospital. Purposive sample was used to recruit 100 infertile women attending to the Gynecology clinic at Benha University Hospital during seven months. Three tools were used for data collections: A Structured interviewing questionnaire, women’s attitude toward adaptation of infertility and female sexual function index was conducted to assess sexual function in infertile women. Results: Revealed that 49.0% of women had poor knowledge before intervention. However, 73.0% of them had good knowledge after one month of intervention respectively. Moreover, there was a highly statistically significant correlation (P < 0.01) between the infertile women' sexual function scores pre and post one month of intervention. As well as, only 4.0 % of the studied women had positive attitude toward adaptation of infertility before intervention. Meanwhile, after one month of intervention the positive attitude changed to 92.0% respectively. Conclusion: the implementation of an educational intervention was effective and significantly improved women’s knowledge, practice and attitude towards natural fertility methods and sexual skills. The study recommended that adequately planned in-service training programs related to sexual function and satisfaction must be established to develop women’s knowledge, practices and attitude in order to fit newly developed concepts for adaptation.

Infertility, fertility methods, female sexual function