The Relationship between Selected Factors and Self-care of School-aged Thalassemic Patients at Chaiyaphum Hospital

Abstract

This descriptive research aims to study: (1) theself-care of school-aged thalassemic patients,(2) therelationship between school-aged thalassemic patientûsselected factors and their self-care. selected factors ofschool-aged thalassemic patients, such as patientsfactors (like health perception, age, sex, schoolingoutcome, times of hospital visit), and factors of theircare takers (like education level, income, and familyfeature). The population for this research was 233school-aged thalassemic patients aged 9-12 years,visited Chaiyaphum hospital in 2007. The samples werepurposively selected for 70 patients. Data collectingwas conducted during May to June 2008. The toolsused for data collecting were questionnaires producedby the researcher under checking of content validity byfive professionals consisting of nursing instructors,pediatricians, pediatric nurse, and reliability tested bySPSS program obtaining reliability 0.72. Data collectionwas conducted by having the child patients answerquestions by themselves undergoing with researcherûsassistance for their smooth responding. Data analyzingwas done by simple statistics such as percentage, meanand standard deviation to feature out the variables to bestudied. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficientand Chi-square were used to test relationship between school-aged thalassemic patientûs selected factors andtheir self-care.The findings were as following :The child patients scored their self-care at82.6%, with majority of 61.4% had well taken care ofthemselves and none of them had taken care themselvespoorly. Selected factors that correlated with self-careof school-aged thalassemic patient at the significantlevel 0.05 were health perception, age and sex. Healthperception and age had related with Pearsonûs correlativecoefficient (r) at 0.396 and 0.260 respectively whilewith sex at relationship degree by ContingencyCoefficient at 0.234. Other factors had no statisticsignificant relationship with self-care.