Knowledge and Practice Among Parents/Guardians of Children with Sickle Cell Disease on Home Prevention and Management of Painful Crisis Attending Bugando Medical Centre, Mwanza, Tanzania.
- Mwanza, Tanzania | Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences [CUHAS-Bugando] | 2024.
- 43 Pages Includes References
Abstract:
Background: Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a hereditary blood disorder that affects about 312,000 newborns worldwide each year; with over 70% of all affected births occur in sub Saharan Africa (SSA). It is associated high morbidity and mortality among children in SSA. In SCD, acute, painful episodes are among the reasons for these patients to seek medical attention and majority ends up being admitted. To reduce the number of outpatients, visit and admission, we propose developing a training tool, which will be used for home prevention and early management of painful crisis in children with SCD. We hypothesize that training parents/guardians of children with sickle cell disease on early prevention detection and management of painful crisis will lower the number of outpatient visits and admission. In that context, the present project aims to (i) Develop training tool (ii) Train parents/guardian of children with SCD on how to prevent and manage painful crisis at home.
Objective: To access the knowledge and practise among parents / guardian of children with sickle cell diseases on home prevention and management of painful crisis attending at Bugando Medical Centre, Mwanza, Tanzania
Methodology: Parent/guardians knowledge and practices on pain management were assessed using a questionnaire. The project was conducted among parents attending BMC, north-western Tanzania, parents were given questionnaire and asked to circle on most correct answers and assessed their level of knowledge.
Project implication: Accessing this knowledge on prevention and simple home management of sickle cell crisis will lead towards reducing morbidity and help in developing clinical protocol to improve and standardize how parents/guardians should prevent and manage simple painful crisis all patients at our sickle cell community.
Results: From the study about two third (84.4%) of parents/guardians where able to recognize child presenting with sickle cell related pain crisis and majority (60%) recognize their children as they were calmness/agitated, 17% alertness, 20% by breathing rate and 3% by others signs, and among those About 79.4% of parents/guardian their children presented to hospital due to sickle cell related pain and out of all about 82.5% where admited because of that sickle cell related pain. In term of practices, 90.5% show out that there is possible way to prevent pain full crisis, to which 78.8% they can manage sickle cell pain at home, the majority 72% manage mild-acute pain while 28% were mild-chronic, to which they use varieties of practices at home such as hydration(45.3%), relaxation(39.2%), ensuring warmth(51.9%), breakthrough pain by analgesic(47.5%) .
Conclusion: In conclusion, the research findings suggested that a significant number of parents/guardians capable of identifying and managing painful crisis of their children at home, reach hospital early and with good conditions of their child compare to those unaware, so implementing certain practices at home to address this painful crisis not only improves outcomes, reduce need for hospital admissions, but also ensure that children arrive at hospital in stable condition with non-critical pain levels, this proactive approach by parents in recognizing and managing painful crisis at home has the potential to improve overall condition of patient , decrease morbidity and mortality rates.
Wurzburg Road 35, Premises, Post Code: 33102 | P. O. Box 1464 Mwanza, Tanzania | Phone: (255) 28-298-3384 | Fax: (255) 28-298-3386 | Email: vc@bugando.ac.tz Website: www.bugando.ac.tz