Assessment of Preventive Foot Care Practices among Patients with Diabetes Mellitus Type II

Abstract

Background: Diabetic foot problems are one of the most important complications of diabetes mellituswhich causing a worldwide high cost morbidity which could be due to poor self-practices.Objectives: To assess the preventive food care practices among diabetic patients and to find out anysignificant association of these practices with selected socio-demographical and diabetic relatedcharacteristics.Patients and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in Baquba city from theperiod of 20th Septembers, 2016 up to 20th March, 2017, by selecting a sample of (120) patients byusing a structured questionnaire, the questionnaire composed of three parts, the first part containsinformation related to patients’ demographic characteristics, the second part contains someinformation related to diabetic characteristics and the third part of the questionnaire consists ofdifferent questions about preventive foot care practices which consist of 14 positive items. Each oneof these items must be answered either with (Always, Never or Sometimes). A three levels Likertscale was used to measure the variables. Finally, the data analyzed using SPSS (Ver.18) and the Chisquarewas used to find out any association between studied data and preventive foot care practices. P≤ 0.05 was considered significant in the present study.Results: Out of 120 diabetic patients, (40%) of them were over 60 years, (52.5%) were male patients,about one third (32.5%) were illiterate, most of them (40.8%) had moderate monthly income, majorityof them (66.7%) were living in urban areas. Also the current study showed that the patient responsesto preventive foot care practices were satisfactory at all studied items, except at the these items“drying my feet after washing, regular use of lotion or oil to moisturizing foot, taking care whenclipping my toenail and visiting doctor after foot injury , their responses assessment wereunsatisfactory. It was found that (62.5%) of the studied patients had an acceptable and good foot carepractices.Conclusions: It concluded from this study that most of the diabetic patients had an acceptable andgood foot care practices, and didn’t indicate a significant association between the patients’ age,gender, residency, duration of disease and previous history of foot ulcer with an overall assessment ofpreventive foot care practices and there was only a significant association with overall assessment ofthe studied preventive diabetic foot care practices with patients’ educational level and monthlyincome.