The Effect of Self Care Education on Quality of Life among Patients with Heart Failure

One of the most widespread cardiovascular disorders is Heart failure and is expressed as a chronic, progressive and disabling disorder. Many research have shown that quality of life in heart failure patients is low. one of the promoting ways of quality of life is self care education. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of self care education on quality of life among heart failure patients. This study is a quasi-experimental research which is done on 126 heart failure patients whom were selected from persons referring to Tehran Rajaei Heart Center and were assigned equivalently in intervention and control group by the way of randomly permuted blocks. Data collection was tooled by demographic specification form, questionnaire of quality of life of heart failure patients and “European heart Failure Self-Care Behaviour Scale”. Intervention group patients lied in 6 groups, each group contents of 10 persons for education and participants were educated in 4-6 sessions. The educational package was given to these patients, finally. Time for each session was 30-45 minutes. For data analyzing, Paired T-test and Independent T-test, Chi-square, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Levens test and analyze of covariance were used. There was no significant difference between two groups in total quality of life (P=0.214) and self care (P=0.795) before intervention, but after intervention these differences were significant (P<0.001). Also, there were significant differences between two groups after intervention in average of physical-activity, socio-economical, mental and general health dimensions of quality of life (P<0.001). Quality of life and self care of intervention group were more significantly than before intervention (P<0.001), but there was no significant difference between before and after score of quality of life (P=0.154) and self care (P=0.431) in control group. Results of study show that the education of self care was effective on quality of life among heart failure patients and researchers recommend this intervention as a one of the suitable and benefit styles for promoting the quality of life in these patients.