Effects of an Educational Intervention for Promoting Readmission Preventive Behaviors among Mothers of Children with Pneumonia

Abstract

     Pneumonia is a common respiratory disease and a major cause of death among children. Mother’s care is significant at all levels of prevention of pneumonia. A quasi-experimental research, the pretest-posttest design with non-equivalent group, aimed to examine the effects of an educational intervention for promoting readmission preventive behaviours among mothers of children with pneumonia.  A sample of 49 mothers of pneumonia children aged 0-1year and admitted at the pediatric ward of a university hospital was recruited in the study – 24 for an experimental group and 25 for a comparison group. The experimental group received the educational intervention putting into routine curative service system. The intervention was designed based on the self-efficacy theory consisting of three main components: one on one basis of educational sessions at the patient ward, at the discharge unit, and a 3-time follow-up via Line application. The comparison group received the usual service of health education. The study had been carried out for 1-month period. Data were collected in order to evaluate intervention effects by using an interviewed questionnaire and analyzed using paired t-test, independent t-test, and z-test.

     The results after the experiment showed that the experimental group had better mean scores of knowledge on hospital-readmission prevention, self-efficacy, and outcome expectation of hospital-readmission prevention as compared with those before the experiment (p<0.001), and had                    a significantly better change in those scores as compared with the comparison group (p<0.001).                 The mean score of readmission preventive behaviours in the experimental group was also significantly higher than that in the comparison group (p<0.001), while hospital readmission was not found within 28 days after discharge in both groups. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the educational intervention and the potential for integrating into hospital curative service systems for children with pneumonia. However, the intervention should be further tested in other groups of mother