Abstract:
The purposes of this research were 1) to examine the level of perception of health, factors affecting self-care, motivation for self-care, and behaviour and patterns of personal care of the hypertension patients with and without complications, 2) to compare between the selfcare patterns of the patients with and without complications, and 3) to investigate the relationship among variables and to look for predictive indicators of the patients behaviour. The sample subjects consisted of 362 hypertension patients both with and without complications who visited the Vachira Phuket Hospital. Questionnaires were used to collect the data for this study with a reliability level of 0.85. The data was then analyzed and shown as frequency, percentages, means, S.D. and Stepwise Multiple Regression.
The results of the analysis were as follows:
Both hypertension patients with and without complications had a level of perception of their health status, motivation, and self-care at a moderate level. The self- care behaviour of both groups was found to be indifferent. For the patients without complications, it was found that the following variables were related with their self- care behaviour at the level of 0.01: the perception of health problems, support from health professionals, and support from family. Support from friends with hypertension was the other variable which was also found to relate to the patients behaviour at the level of 0.05. For the patients with complications, it was found that the following variables were related with their self-care behaviour at the level of 0.01: health problems, support from health professionals, support from family and support from friends with hypertension.
The result from the regression analysis showed that the following variables could predict the self-care behaviour of the non-complication group at the level of 0.01: support from family, perception of health problem, and support from health professionals. These variables were also found to be positively related to the patients self-care behaviour, while the variable of the perception of severity was found to be negatively related at the level of 0.05. However, the following variables could predict the self-care behaviour of the hypertension patients with complications at the level of 0.01 and 0.05 : perception of problems, support from family, as well as perception of risk. The variable of the perception of severity was found to be negatively related to the self-care behaviour at the level of 0.10.