Effects of Nurse-Led Educational Program on the Quality of Life Among Adult Patients with Epilepsy

Abstract

A scarcity of research studies exists on how epilepsy impacts the QoL of adults among the Arabian population, albeit there is a high prevalence of epilepsy in Saudi Arabia, 6.54 per 1000 (Altwijri, 2021). Meanwhile, the point prevalence of active epilepsy worldwide was 6.38 per 1,000 persons (95% confidence interval [95% CI] 5.57–7.30), while the lifetime prevalence was 7.60 per 1,000 persons (95% CI 6.17–9.38) (Feist et al., 2017). Recent studies showed that the negative attitudes and misconceptions toward epilepsy persist (Altwijri et al., 2016; Al-Dossari et al., 2018) because of lack of awareness, and public misconception. Much more, there are also insufficient research studies on how to improve the QoL (Neyaz et al., 2016). A total of 50 adult patients with epilepsy (PWE) aged 18 to 65 in a hospital located at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia underwent the nurse-led education program and completed the QOLIE-31 questionnaire in the three measurement points. A repeated-measures ANOVA determined that mean overall QOLIE-31 scores differed significantly across three time periods namely pre-intervention, two weeks post-intervention, and two weeks post repeated intervention (F (2, 98) = 108.626, p = .000). Hence, this research study posits that nurse-led education had significant positive outcome on the overall quality of life of adult patients living with epilepsy.