The Effectiveness of Midwife-Led Interventions to Address Post-Partum Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Critical Appraisal of Clinical Trials

Background & Objective: Clinical trials are studies that can provide the most reliable evidence to investigate the impact of various interventions in health research. Due to the importance of these studies in producing valid scientific evidence, this study was conducted to critically evaluate the published clinical trials regarding the effectiveness of midwife-led interventions on preventing post-traumatic stress disorder after childbirth. Materials & Methods: In this critical appraisal, we searched for published randomized clinical trials articles related to midwife-led interventions in preventing post-traumatic stress disorders in reputable databases using the keywords "traumatic childbirth", "post-traumatic stress disorder", "intervention", "counseling", "midwife", "clinical trial" and their equivalent in Persian, without time limit. Out of 18581 retrieved articles, 12 articles were evaluated using CONSORT-2018. This checklist consisted of 26 sections and 42 items. Each item was scored based on the reported in the article under review. The tool scores ranged from zero to 42. Data were analyzed using SPSS 21. Results: The overall compliance of the quality of the reviewed articles with the checklist criteria was estimated at 60.1%. The mean overall quality was 25.1±3.6 and therefore the articles were of moderate quality. The title and abstract sections, background, goals, and interpretation of the results were of high quality, whereas the discussion section and other information were of low quality. Half of the articles did not report the type of randomization, method of generating allocation sequence and allocation concealment. Conclusion: In order to use the results of clinical trials in evidence-based care related to the effectiveness of midwifery-led interventions on reducing post-traumatic stress disorder, improving the quality of articles is essential, and using a standard checklist should be on the agenda of authors and reviewers of journals.