Self-Care Behavior Among Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Attending Outpatient Department of a Tertiary Care Center of Nepal

Abstract

Introduction: Self-care has been identified as integral to maintaining the health and wellbeing of people with long-term conditions like COPD, and may contribute to effective and sustainable delivery of healthcare services. The objective of this study was to assess the self-care behavior among the patient with COPD attending Medical OPD of BPKIHS and to find out the association between the self-care behavior with the selected variables.

Methods: Quantitativedescriptive cross sectional study design was used to conduct the study on self-care behavior among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease attending medical Outpatient Department of BPKIHS. A total of 178 respondents were interviewed through semi structured questionnaire and were analyzed using SPSS using mean, frequency, and percentage as descriptive analysis. For inferential analysis, chi square test was used and identified associationat the significance level of 0.05.

Result: More than half of the respondents (52.8%) had adequate overall self-care behavior.More than one third (38.8%) of the respondents were from age group 60-70 years with mean age ± SD 64.5 ±11.07. Majority of the respondents (62.9%) were female. There was significant association between overall self-care behavior and gender, address, education, smoking, knowledge of self-care behavior, number of times of admission, exposure to indoor air pollutant, medication adherence, protein intake, follow-up visit (p<0.05).

Conclusion: This study shows more than half of the respondents had adequate overall self-care behavior. Educational interventions considering associated factors should be planned to improve self-care behavior among COPD Patients.