Abstract
Purpose: :
A glaucoma educational program was developed to try to improve patients’ knowledge about glaucoma and their compliance to treatment. This pilot study aimed at evaluating patients’ satisfaction toward the program and their conception of acquired knowledge and skills resulting from it.
Methods: :
Six focus groups were conducted. Thirty-nine individuals (mean age = 69.3, ±9.5 years) participated in focus groups either at two weeks or at six months after their attendance to the program. A trained moderator used open discussion and a script based on the content of the program to obtain comments from the participants regarding their satisfaction with the program, and their perceived acquired knowledge and skills. Verbatim recordings of focus groups were analysed by a mixed-model qualitative data analysis software, and essential outcomes were extracted.
Results: :
The focus groups provided 87 semantic units related to the perception of the patients toward the glaucoma educational program and its impact on their life. Almost all participants considered the content as adequate and responding to their needs (2 weeks groups: 100.0%, 6 months groups: 95.2%), but had residual misconceptions or lost some information (2 weeks groups: 83.3%, 6 months groups: 71.4%). In both the shorter term and the longer term groups, two thirds of participants indicated that the program allowed them to learn the appropriate skills to instil drops. When asked what was the most important thing they had learnt in the program, 88.9% of the 2 weeks groups and 85.7% of the 6 months groups mentioned the importance of the compliance with the treatment.
Conclusions: :
Participants expressed a high level of satisfaction with the content of the educational program. Even if an important effort was made to tackle and correct misconceptions regarding glaucoma in the program, some persistent erroneous ideas were uncovered by the focus groups. However, awareness to the importance of compliance with the glaucoma treatment seemed to come out as a strong semantic unit in both the 2 weeks groups and the 6 months groups. Future researches are needed to investigate if an increased awareness to the importance of compliance leads to better health behaviour.
Keywords: clinical (human) or epidemiologic studies: health care delivery/economics/manpower • learning