Background: The birth plan raises women’s knowledge, improves empowerment, and promotes childbirth outcomes. Aim of the study was to implement a birth plan and evaluate its effect on women childbirth outcomes and empowerment. Design: A quasi-experimental comparative design. Sampling: A purposive sample of 194 pregnant women was enrolled and equally allocated into two groups (the intervention group who engaged in a birth plan to receive planned care during childbirth, a control group who received routine hospital care) 97 women each. Setting: The study was conducted at the obstetrics outpatient clinic and in the delivery room of Benha University Hospital. Tools: four tools were used for data collection; A Structured Self-Administration Questionnaire, Birth plan fulfillment sheet, childbirth outcomes sheet, Childbirth related Empowerment Scale. Results: that there were highly significant difference in most items of designed birth plan care during 1st, 2nd and 3rd stage between control and study group (P ≤ 0.001) and there was a significant decrease in mean ± SD of 1st stage duration and the total duration of childbirth stages of the study group comparing to the control group (P ≤ 0.05). Before implementing the birth plan, there was no statistical significance difference between control and study group regarding childbirth-related empowerment scale as (p ˃ 0.05) while after implementation, there were highly statistically significant differences regarding most items of birth-related empowerment scale as (P ≤ 0.001). Conclusion: the birth plan has a higher implementation of designed childbirth care, a positive effect on maternal and fetal outcomes and there was a highly significant increase in the total women`s empowerment scores after implementing birth plan (p |
