Title: Evaluation of knowledge and attitude of cancer patients regarding chemotherapy
Abstract:
Background of the Study: Cancer refers to a large group of disorders characterized by abnormal cell growth and metastasis. Due to its diversity and complexity, it has no single treatment nor can it be attributed to a single etiologic agent. It is the 2nd leading cause of death in the US, one of every three Americans probably develop cancer (Volker, 1998). Chemotherapy, the treatment of cancer with drugs, is an essential weapon for both cure and palliation. The chemotherapeutic agent is cytotoxic in nature, which results in the cell's death of both malignant and normal cells that are rapidly dividing cells, bone marrow, GI, hair follicle, and gonadal cells suffer the greater impact (Volker, 1998). The nurse's role in helping cancer patients is broad. Clients and their families look to the nurse for assistance and guidance in all phases of illness from primary prevention to terminal care. The real challenge lies in finding ways to promote self-care. Providing the appropriate information to patients must be an integrate component of this challenge. (Elis, et. al, 2000). The expanding role of nurse in chemotherapy by itself has become an area of specialization. Educating cancer patients regarding chemotherapy will help them to cope with chemotherapy and ensure compliance with the treatment regimen. The aim of educating cancer patients, in the present study an informational booklet was developed and tested. This can be used as a teaching strategy. The objective of this study was to assess the knowledge and the attitude regarding chemotherapy among cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, find out the effectiveness of as informational booklet regarding chemotherapy and find the relationship between knowledge and attitude of cancer patients regarding chemotherapy. The suitable hypotheses were established.
Methodology: The study design was one group pretest and posttest, design. Purposive sampling technique was used to select samples from selected hospital in Madurai, the sample size was 30. The tool used for data collection was knowledge questionnaire and an attitude scale. The content validity of the tool was done by medicine and nursing experts and reliability was established.
The findings of the study were that the knowledge of cancer patients regarding chemotherapy was significantly higher in the post-test (20.36) than in the pretest (14.1). The attitude of cancer patients regarding chemotherapy was significantly higher in the post-test (36.23) than in the pretest (29.27). The informational booklet was effective in increasing the knowledge and changing the attitude of cancer patients regarding chemotherapy. There was a significant positive relationship between knowledge and attitude of cancer patients regarding chemotherapy (r = 0.66).
Recommendations: The informational booklet developed should be reviewed from time to time in order to incorporate the current issues in the field of cancer. A comparative study and the same study can be done using the true experimental approach.
