The Effect of Structured Pressure Injury Patient Education Program on Knowledge, Participation, Wound Healing Progress and Quality of Life Among Patient With Limited Mobility

Patients with limited mobility and pressure injury are always at higher risk of having multiple functional, social, psychological, and financial repercussions. Without intensive PI management and prevention, these populations continue to suffer from prolonged pain, infection, social isolation, and exacerbation of mental health conditions.

While many preventive strategies and management are available to ease patient burden due to pressure injury, involving patient to take part in their care make a huge difference in patient outcome. In Malaysia, nurses play an important role in providing patient education on pressure injury, usually delivered through informal routine care, by distributing information leaflet or via digital resources on the Ministry of Health's website. However, the existing pressure injury education content is too broad, only emphasizing pressure injury prevention and no information on pressure injury care.

Few pieces of evidence reported on the effectiveness of patient education were able to improve patient knowledge on PI, increase patient participation in PI care associate with wound healing and improve the quality of life. However, there is a content gap in pressure injury patient education, which is wound care. While there a lot of patient education on pressure injury had been conducted extensively in the literature review, the components of wound care in pressure injury patient education are still unclear. Thus the primary objective of this study is to identify the effect of structured pressure injury patient education on the knowledge, participation, wound healing progress, and quality of life among patients with limited mobility. We hypothesized that there would be a significant effect of structured pressure injury patient education compared to the standard patient education on patient's knowledge, participation, wound healing rate, and quality of life between control and intervention group over time.

To achieve this research objective, we opt to conduct a quasi-experimental study-calculation of sample size is by using STATA 12.0 program. To calculate the sample size, power at 80%, and alpha was pre-set at 0.05. Mean, and standard deviation (σ) were extracted from previous researcher. Based on the calculation, a total of 120 eligible samples will be recruited with 60 samples each arm.

The patients included in the study will be assigned to the experimental group (structured pressure injury patient education) and control group (standard patient education). Eight medical-surgical wards including rehabilitation ward with a high prevalence of pressure injury were identified and invited to participate. Four wards agreed (medical ward, two multidisciplinary wards, and orthopedic ward), and the rest unable to participates because allocated as active COVID-19 ward. Thus, potential participants for this study will be recruited in these four wards in this tertiary hospital. The process of data collection will be started with control group first and followed by intervention group. Considering the limited availability of the target population set in the inclusion criteria earlier, the researcher opts to use convenience sampling.