A Community-based Nursing Intervention Study Of Patients With Hypertension On The Basis Of Their Social Support

OBJECTIVE:The purposes of this study are (1) to conduct an assessment on the state of social support for patients with hypertension in the community, their health-behavior conditions (such as smoking, drinking, diet, exercising, weight control, mood modifying, etc.), the effects of social support on the change of individual behaviors, and the state of utilization and needs for community nursing services, and (2) to investigate the feasibility of a community-based nursing intervention to improve the social support of the patients by making effective use of the community nursing services.DESIGN:Five communities in Fuzhou City participated in the study, which have established health records of the residents, two communities as the intervention section and three communities as the control section. Using a randomly controlled trial research design, 120 patients with hypertension were invited respectively from the two sections. These subjects were assessed on social support,behavior-change and the conditions of utilization and needs for community nursing services by means of questionnaires. The community intervention adopted an experiment-like design, in which an actual total of 226 patients were taken as subjects of the intervention research, patients from intervention section assigned into trial group and those from control section into control group. According to the baseline findings, an intervention plan was established and then continuously carried out in the trial group for 6 months. After the intervention, 216 patients actually responded to the SSRS survey. The improvement level of the social support and effectiveness of the intervention were evaluated by the changes of the SSRS scores of the patients in pre-intervention and post-intervention phase. All data underwent statistical analyses including t-test,chi-square test,...