Coping behaviors in families with children suffering from thalassemia major and evaluating the implementation effect of nursing intervention on these behaviors

Thalassemia disease in children, make the family and especially parents faced with many challenges. Better and more effective coping behaviors in father and mother, are followed by increased quality level of the sick child's life and the other family members. Therefore, the present study is conducted aims to evaluate the implementation effect of nursing intervention on coping behaviors of the families with children with Thalassemia major in Thalassemia Center of Doctor Mohammad Kermanshahi Hospital in Kermanshah at 2015. The research has been semiexperimental and the required information was collected through a 45-articles questionnaire of Maccubin called CHIP. The sample consisted of 38 families with children with Thalassemia major who admitted to the hospital of Doctor Mohammad Kermanshahi in Kermanshah that were selected by convenience sampling method in 2015. First, the coping behaviors of these families were determined and then divided into two groups of 19 individuals randomly that nursing intervention was implemented for 6 weeks in four sessions for each member of intervention group individually. Pre-intervention results indicated that the obtained scores in the first and third scales in each two groups is less than normal. Total post-test scores of coping behaviors in the control group have increased near to 1.05 units compared to the pre-test scores. But post-test scores of the families in the test group have increased near to 10.21 units compared to pre-test scores average. To compare the difference of pre-test and post-test scores between both control and test groups, independent t-test was used and based on the results of this test, a significant difference between two groups was observed (P< 0.05, df= 36, t=-5.928). So, the increase in the scores from pre-test to post-test in the test group was significantly higher. Thus, the implementation of intervention causes a significant increase in coping behaviors of families in the test group compared to the control group. According to the difference between the score average before and after implementation of nursing interventions in the test group compared to the control group, it can be said that implementation of nursing interventions is effective on the coping behaviors of families with children suffering from Thalassemia as well as these families need to strengthen their coping behaviors in the areas of first (maintaining social support) and third (improving social relationships) scales. And this issue needs the plan to implement nursing interventions for these families.