Abstract
It is a severe shock for a mother to learn that her baby is physically defective. Her anxiety and confusion should be handled as early as possible. At their first visit to our hospital, Orientation Class was presented to the mothers in order to provide them with more information about the rehabilitaion program and to promote their co-operation in the program. The Class has been considered to be very effective for the purpose, but more detailed or quantitative assessment of our Class was felt essential for further improvement of our total care system. A series of questionare were filled out by 100 mothers who were the participants with their children aged from 2 to 4 years, in our rehabilitation program. An analysis of their responses revealed that:
a ) Most of the mothers reported that they had a little knowledge about some aspects of clefts, such as the word of “harelip” and the friend with repaired lip, previously the time before she had the baby.
b ) It was a severe shock for the mothers when they met their baby for the first time, then the y thought of death of baby or themselves and that of both.
c ) The Orientation Class played a great role for mothers' better understanding of the etiology of clefts, total care system, and for the relief of general impact of clefts.
d ) During the participation in the longitudinal rehabilitati on program with their children, most of the mothers could realize the rationale for the cleft management. However, those mothers had less th a n adequate information still now and the need for more delicate counseling procedures to provide d etailed informations for future management of their problem was indicated from the results.
