Association between knowledge and adoption of healthy living practices among hypertensive patients at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital
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Date
2020-11-11
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Kamuzu University of Health Sciences
Abstract
Hypertension remains the most rapidly rising cardiovascular disease in Africa. It is a highly
prevalent Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) in Malawi with nearly a third of 25-to-64-year-olds
having raised blood pressure or taking antihypertensive medication. Lifestyle modification is the
first step in hypertension management. The high prevalence of hypertension calls for
implementation of healthy living practices. In Malawi there is limited or no data on the knowledge
and practice of healthy living practices among hypertensive patients hence this study.
Therefore, this study will focus on the association between knowledge and adoption of healthy
living practices among hypertensive patients at QECH. The chief objective is to assess the
association between knowledge and adoption of healthy living practices amongst hypertensive
patients. This study is necessary because it will enlighten the Ministry of Health on how many
hypertensive patients are aware and adopt healthy living practices. Depending on the percentage
of those who are aware and those who are not, the Ministry will be able to put in place interventions
that will educate people on the healthy living practices hence managing and preventing
hypertension.
This will be a cross sectional descriptive study and will use mixed methods, both quantitative and
qualitative. The study will be conducted at QECH in Blantyre, Malawi as captioned in the title.
The study participants will be any patient within the age range of 25 to 64 years old admitted in
the medical ward but has hypertension and those hypertensive patients coming to the general clinic.
Convenience sampling method will be used to identify possible study participants and 126
participants are expected to be enrolled. The study participants will be only those hypertensive
patients that are found at the hospital at that particular time. Data will be collected by doing indepth interviews with the study participants using an interview guide and the data will be analyzed
using Epi-info. It is expected that not all the hypertensive patients that are aware of the healthy
living practices adopt them, some are aware and adopt the healthy living practices and some who
are not aware at all.
All ethical regulations will be followed to ensure that the information assembled in this study is
acceptable and probable limitations of this study will be managed to ensure that the data is precise.
Finally, the data collected from this study will be presented at the CoMREC research
dissemination.
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Research Subject Categories::MEDICINE