Effect of Nursing Interventions on Depression Treatment in Depressive Patients: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Introduction: Depression accounted for 4.4% of total disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)  in worldwide. In 2020, due to increasing incidences of depression and immense impacts of this condition, research about depression has grown in many different research fields, such as medicine, nursing, psychology, and social science. We wanted to synthesize previous literature on interventions to reduce levels of depression and improve patient outcomes in order to develop evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for treating depression. Objectives: To analyze characteristics and the effect sizes of studies about nursing interventions conducted to reduce symptoms of depressive patients in Thailand. Methods:  Inclusion criteria included: 1) being an experimental or quasi- experimental research, 2) examining impact of a nursing intervention to reduce depression symptoms among patients in Thailand, 3) published during 2006-2013. Twenty-eight studies met all the inclusion criteria and were selected. Data was extracted a research characteristics recording form based on materials developed by Glass, McGraw, and Smith (1981). Descriptive statistics were used to analyze content and research methods.  Results: All studies were conducted using quasi-experimental design. Most of the studies used psychological interventions (n=24), and a small proportion used cognitive therapy (n=5). One-third of studies had a sample size between 10-20 samples (n=10). Half of the studies utilited a one-group pretest-posttest design to test the effectiveness of the intervention was used as hypothesis testing of the interventions (n=14). About 21% of the included studies were conducted between 3 and 5 weeks (6 studies).  Based on the results from the 28 studies, the standardized mean difference (d) for measures of depressive symptoms was 2.57. We considered this standardized mean difference to be large when considering the type of study that was conducted. The operation focused on mental health. Nursing practice focuses on the social care and influences as well (d = 2.48, 2.07 and 2.93). Conclusion: This study suggested that depression treatment should be an integrated operation that includes psychological care, nursing, social care, and of course, the people with depression themselves. The results of our meta-analysis should encourage the patients to seek out integrated treatments.