Factors Associated with Self-Care Practice among Adult Diabetes Patients

Abstract

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a major public health problem worldwide, and the magnitude of its complication is steadily increasing in developing countries. Adherence to diabetes self-care activities is reportedly a vital strategy to halt diabetes related mortalities and morbidities. However, shortage of relevant studies on the area being made things difficult to understand the associated factors, the level of self-care practice and whether it has significantly fired up the prevalence of diabetes complications. Methods: A facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 213 diabetes mellitus patients follow-up at Tercha Zonal diabetes center selected by systematic random sampling. Data were entered into Epi-Data version 4.6 and exported to SPSS version 25 for analysis. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to describe and test the association between selected variables. Statistical significance was declared at p-value <0.05. Results: Out of the 213 study participants, only 84 (39.4%) had good self-care practices. The multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that attending secondary education P =0.01, and college and above P <0.001, and having diabetes complications, P=0.013 were significantly associated with self-care practice. Conclusion: The study revealed that a significant number of the study participant has poor self-care practices in control of diabetes mellitus and prevention of complication. Educational level and having diabetes complications were found statistically significantly associated with a good level of self-care practice. Therefore, all frontline healthcare providers should provide basic information and counselling regarding diabetes self-care practice