Development and evaluation of self-care agency promoting programme for prostatectomy patients

The quasi-experimentation was conducted to develop a self-care agency promoting program on prostate-cancer patients' self-care activities and quality of life and evaluate its effectiveness. The self-care agency promoting program for prostatectomy patients was developed from the analysis of self-care problems of prostatectomy patients and involved the nursing strategies focused on the four principal sources of information that were used in the Orem's self-care theory. This experimentation was designed for a non-equivalent control group before and after design. 69 subjects who had prostatectomy at a leading hospital in Seoul were examined: 35 subjects for the experimental group and 34 for the control group. Data was collected right before treatments and 8 weeks after prostatectomy and analyzed with descriptive statistics, chi 2 test, t-test and Analysis of covariance. The study showed that there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in both self-care agency and quality of life. However, there was no significant difference in self-care activities between the experimental and the control groups. Taken together, the Self-care Agency Promoting Program for Prostatectomy patients was proved to be an effective nursing enhancement program for prostatectomy patients. This program can be applied in nursing field to promote self-care agency and can also contribute to patients' quality of life.