Assessment of barriers to self-care in diabetic patients in Port-Said City Family Medicine Centers

Abstract EN

Chronic diseases often occur as comorbidities.

Diabetes mellitus is a common prob-lem leading to compromised health problems, without proper treatments many complications can occur.

Successful management depends on adequate self-care.

Self-care barriers affect the performance of the patient.

Aim: to assess the barriers of self-care in diabetic patients.

Patients and Methods: It is a cross sectional study, conducted on 228 diabetic patients attending three fam-ily medicine centers in Port Said city.

A self-administered modified structured questionnaire was given to each participant to assess barriers of self-care and determine degree of self-care in dia-betic participants.

Results: Eighty-four percent (n= 192) of the patients did not follow their self-care program in an accepted manner, taking treatment of diabetes regularly was the most fol-lowed domain in the program of the self-care by 85.5% (n= 195).

The most frequent barrier to self-care was difficulty in following recommended exercise in 74.1% (n= 169) participants, and the least frequent barrier was poor adherence to medications in 11.8% (n= 27).

Conclusions: The most fre-quent barriers of self-care among the surveyed diabetic patients are: difficulty in following rec-ommended exercise, low education level, difficulty in following recommended dietary plans and annual investigation respectively.

Therefore, we recommend that family physicians and their health care teams should pay attention to the most freque