Introduction: The postpartum period is the time of immense happiness. At the same time, however, it can be a difficult time. It is a period that is intertwined with many bodily, hormonal, and emotional changes, while simultaneously adopting a new social role. How this period will go depends on a number of factors. After the birth, women often experience painful sexual intercourse, dyspareunia. Purpose: The purpose of the bachelor’s thesis is to examine, how episiotomy influences sexual life after childbirth, what are the differences in the incidence of dyspareunia among many types of episiotomy, and how common is for dyspareunia to appear in comparison with the performed episiotomy at birth and also possible transient injuries to the intercourse. Methods: For my bachelor’s thesis, I used the descriptive and casual non-experimental method of empirical research, with a review of the scientific and technical literature. When looking for literature, I used the time frame, so that nothing will be older than 20 years. I was searching in English and Slovene with next keywords and word associations: postpartum, sexuality after delivery, episiotomy, dyspareunia, dyspareunia sexual problems, painful intercourse, postpartum, medial episiotomy, and dyspareunia after episiotomy. The literature was searched using the following browsers: COBISS, DiKUL, Medline, CINAHL, scholar web source Google Učenjak and Cochrane. Results: 69% of women felt dyspareunia after childbirth. 75% of these women also had an episiotomy. In 79% of women, mediolateral episiotomy was performed, while the median was performed on other 21% of women. Most women (45% of them) had a mediolateral episiotomy, up to two centimeters long. 35% of women started sexual intercourse between 8 weeks and 3 months after the childbirth and the smallest amount of women had sexual intercourse before the 6th week (only 14%). The majority of women started with regular sexual intercourse 3 months after the childbirth (56% of women). 19% of women with episiotomy and 8% of women without episiotomy experienced severe pain in the first 6 months after the birth. 12 months after the childbirth, only 1% of women with episiotomy felt severe pain, while women without it didn’t feel any pain. 56% of women had to stop sexual intercourse because of pain. Discussion and conclusion: We found out that episiotomy strongly affects the incidence, pain, and duration of dyspareunia. It is important that episiotomy is not performed routinely and that the healthcare workers are aware of the consequences that episiotomy leaves on women and their everyday life. It is also important that women learn about preventive measures to prevent episiotomy and Dyspareunia.
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