The Effect of Therapeutic Relationship Combination with Empowerment Program in Palliative Care on Stress, Anxiety and Quality of life in Patients and Caregivers

Abstract

The purpose of this quasi-experimental research were to study the effect of a therapeutic relationship combination with empowerment program on stress, anxiety, and quality of life of patients and caregivers. The sample were 20 patients who needed palliative care and 20 caregivers. The tools of experiment were therapeutic relationship and empowerment program created by researchers according to concepts of therapeutic relationship’s Peplau (1997) and empowerment’s Gibson (1995) The researcher conducted all stages of the program, and evaluated with stress, anxiety and quality of life tests which examined by the experts with content validity and tested the reliability.The reliability of the tests were .924, .922, and .939 respectively. The results of the research were analysed by deseriptive statistic and dependent t-test, can be summarized as follows:- 1) After using the program, stress and anxiety of patients were reduced statistically significantly at .05, while there was no statistically significant difference in quality of life of patients before and after using the program. 2) After using the program, stress of caregivers was reduced, while psychological aspect of quality of life was increased statistically increased with significant differences at .05. There was no statistically significant difference in anxiety and overall of quality of life of caregivers before and after using the program. From this study, can be concluded that using of the therapeutic relationship combination with empowerment program can reduce stress and anxiety in the patients. While in caregivers, this program can reduced only stress and increase only psychological aspect of quality of life. Therefore, it would be much better if we could find some methods to increase the overall of quality of life of both patients and caregivers.