The Model of Quality of Life Improvement for Chronic Patients in Community by Using Social Support

Abstract

Problem statement: Caring for a chronically ill-patients is a complex process which require the cooperation and social support to manage a chronic disease. It need an interaction of a large number of actors or collaborations from health care personnel of different organizations. Questions were raised to develop an appropriate intervention and the model of QOL improvement for chronic-patients in the community. Approach: To (1) develop the Quality Of Life (QOL) improvement for chronic illness patients in community by using social support program (2) evaluate the effects of the program on perception of illness, severity of illness, benefits and barriers of health promotion, health behaviors, Quality Of Life (QOL) and stress level. Participatory Action Research (PAR) was used. It was consisted of two phrases. The participants in first phase including with nurses, nutritionist, patients, caregivers, Village Health Volunteers (VHVs) and research team. The second phrase was to implement the interventions and evaluation. A total of 10 VHVs and 50 participants who met the inclusion criteria. The intervention composed of 2 main programs; (1)The VHVs were trained for 1 month as a comprehensive program to be a healthcare team collaboration. (2)The chronically ill-patients received main interventions including self-care education, apply Thai traditional medicine and home visits. Descriptive statistics and t-test were use to evaluate the pre-post intervention. Results: The majority of the participants were female (n = 38,76%), with the mean age of 66.68 years (SD = 17.20), 85% caring by their children and 42.5% by their relatives. Most participants came from low income family (40%). The post test score on each item showed that after intervention, changed scores on all five items (before-after), how ever the changes were statistically significantly (<0.05) by some items, they were perceive of benefits and barriers of health promotion, health behaviors and stress level.. The rest as perceive of illness, perceive of severity of illness and QOL were not statistically significant (>0.05). Conclusion: The findings suggested the set of interventions were effective to improve QOL of chronic patients and it was the appropriate model. To improve health care providers’s knowledge, skills and increasing of collaborations among multidisciplinary team, Local Administration Organization (LAO). VHVs and Health Care Service Centre were strongly recommended to work with chronic patients.