Title: Enhancing Parental Self-management of Child’s Seizure Disorder by a Structured Educational Intervention: a Randomized Controlled Trial
Authors: Ms Merin Sara Mathew, Ms Milu Elsa Paul, Dr Anna Mathew, Dr M C Mathew, Mrs. Susan Sosa Jacob, Mr Saravana Kumar Velusamy
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.18535/jmscr/v4i10.77
Seizure disorder is a chronic paediatric condition which requires parental commitment to self-management to ensure quality of life for the child and the family. Hence this prospective, parallel group, randomized controlled clinical trial was planned to study whether structured education enhances parental self-management of their child’s seizure disorder. Sixty four parents of children, below 18 years of age, attending the Developmental Paediatrics and Child Neurology outpatient department, in a tertiary care centre in South India, who gave written informed consent were recruited into the study after institutional ethical committee approval was received. The department is located in a rural area and serves children with special needs who come from various parts of this state and the neighbouring states. The instrument used to assess efficacy of self-management was the Paediatric Epilepsy Self- Management Questionnaire (PEMSQ) (in the local language) after permission was obtained from the author. The first contact PEMSQ was administered on recruitment to the study by an independent assessor. The participants were randomized by permuted block randomization into two groups, the intervention group and the comparator group. Allocation was concealed from the assessor. After 72 hours the follow up PEMSQ was administered by the blinded assessor. The improvement in the follow up score compared to the first contact score was recorded and compared to find if there was a significant difference between the two groups. The non-parametric Wilcoxon Mann Whitney U test was used to compare the scores statistically using SPSS version 16. Our study showed significant improvement in the parental scores for self-management using the PEMSQ. There was also improvement in all the four PEMSQ sub-scalesi. knowledge of seizure disorder, ii. commitment to adherence to treatment, iii. beliefs about efficacy of drugs, and iv. barriers to treatment Thus we conclude that there is a significant enhancement of parental self-management following the structured education given to the intervention group compared to the comparator group.
Abstract
