EFFECT OF HEALTH EDUCATION INTERVENTION ON TREATMENT ADHERENCE IN PATIENTS WITH PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS IN LAGOS STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Non adherence to anti-tuberculosis treatment increases the risk for the development of Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, re-occurrence and mortality. Therefore, this research examined the effect of health education intervention on treatment adherence among pulmonary tuberculosis patients in Lagos state, Nigeria. The study adopted the Quasi-experimental research design and one hundred tuberculosis patients were randomly selected from two chest clinic hospitals. Fifty participants were each selected for the control and experimental groups. The experimental group undergo the normal routine tuberculosis care and health education session while the control group received only the routine care. The health education intervention lasted for eight weeks. Morisky 8-Item Questionnaire and Tuberculosis Knowledge and Attitudinal Questionnaire were used to measure the rate of adherence before and after the intervention. The descriptive statistics of frequency counts and percentages was used to analyse the demographic variable of the participants while inferential statistics of independent t-test was used to determine the mean difference of the stated hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The result revealed that there is great improvement on treatment adherence among the experimental group and also knowledge and attitude of the experimental group significantly improved compared to the control group. The study recommends that health education intervention should be adopted as part of the DOTS Strategies in combating and controlling tuberculosis in the society.