Effect of a Planned Health Teaching on Improving Knowledge and Competence of Home Care Practice of Post Stroke Patient Among Caregivers' Achievement

Background: Stroke is one of the major healthcare challenges, being one of the leading causes of death, disability, and dependency in the activity of daily living worldwide Homecare of stroke patients is having a great role in the patient recovery. Patient family caregivers and relatives can play an important role in the care of patients. But how to continue proper care of the patient at home after discharge, they don't know what to do and don't have practice as well. In this view, the researcher believes that it might be a great help for caregivers and the patients to teach theirs about stroke and home care of stroke patients. Objective: The study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a planned health teaching on the caregiver's knowledge and competence of home care of stroke patients. Therefore, improve the patients' functional ability. Methods: The two group pre and post-test, quasi-experimental design was conducted among 50 caregivers of stroke patients, assigned to 25 caregivers as a control group and 25 caregivers as an experimental group. The study was done in the university hospital at El Fayoum city from 1st March 2019 to 31st August 2019. Four tools were used for data collection after reviewing relevant data as the following; a structured interviewing questionnaire, caregiver's knowledge questionnaire regarding stroke, caregiver's practices regarding bed position, Position Change and Transfer, and Range of Motion Exercises, and patient function ability assessment according to Barthel index. Results: revealed that there was a poor score level of knowledge and competence of home care practices before the intervention. However, there was an improvement of score level in the control and experimental group post-intervention, but the higher score was observed in the experimental group. The mean score level of patient functional ability in the experimental group improved than the control group through follow up. Highly statistical significance was found between control and experimental group post-intervention related to knowledge and practices. A positive significant correlation between caregiver's practices and patients function ability in the experimental group was found. Conclusion: planned health teaching is important after patients discharge to increase the caregiver's knowledge and competence of home care practices of post-stroke patients; resulting in improved patient functional ability.