A Study To Assess The Basic Living Skills Of Mentally Ill Patients In Psychiatric Hospital.
Abstract
It is well known that most of the psychiatric disorders are associated with severe and persisting disability and development of remedial measures to prevent disability need utmost attention. Self-care is learn, culturally linked, deliberate action which (1) leads to decision to act and includes deciding what is to be done for what purpose, (2) follow the decision to act, including performance of the action. Even when self-care is performed out of habit it is still a deliberate action. Self-care is a response to attend to oneself. The purpose of the deliberate action called self-care is named as self-care requisites. Psychiatric patients lack interest in self-care in the absence of physical disability.
Skill training has been found effective in rehabilitating psychiatric patients. This study was aimed at finding out deficits in basic living skills of psychiatric patients, train them in basic living skills, and assess the effect of structures teaching through video film and follow up. The following hypotheses were formulated:
- There will be deficits in basic living skills in psychiatric patients.
- Patients with deficits in areas of basic living skills show improvement after structured teaching programme.
- There will be significant difference in the areas of basic living skills in experimental and control groups.
Experimental design was adopted with 50 subjects in experimental group and 50 subjects in control group. Matching was done on socio demographic variables as well as on base line data on deficits. Tools used were socio demographic profile and rating scale on basic living skills, which were developed and validated by researcher. Areas covered in the rating scale were housekeeping, toileting, brushing teeth, bathing, hair care, nail care, dressing, eating habits, money management, interacting with others and spending leisure time.
Rating scale was validated for content and construct validity. Reliability was tested by inter-rator reliability (r=0.9933) and test - retest reliability (r=0.6532) Pearson's Product Movement Correlation method was used for the reliability testing. Chi-square test was used to compare experimental and control groups on socio demographic variables. Student * t * test was used to know the comparative differences among both groups on scores obtained on rating scale globally and area wise. Both groups did not differ at base line. After the base line assessment experimental group underwent structured teaching through video film where as control group did not undergo teaching. Both groups were assessed after 5 days and 10 days. On * t' test the scores of experimental group were significantly higher, than the control group (p <0.000) with df = 98 on total scores as well as on scores on all 11 areas. It is concluded that deficits in basic living skills could be reduced by structured teaching in psychiatric in-patients thereby rehabilitating them effectively.
