Selfcare of the user with diabetes inside the primary health care.
Nursing; Selfcare; Diabetes Mellitus; Primary Health Care.
The diabetes mellitus is among the chronic diseases of the highest global impact regarding health. It is one of the main causes of mortality in Brazil, probably a reflex of the population’s current profile, a consequence of demographic changes, with high prevalence and low control rates, in the adult population. Therefore, there is the need of a higher focus in the actions of control, prevention and early detection of the cases, in order to diminish complications. With this in mind, the afflicted patients must be modifying agents of their health, and it is possible to foresee in the actions of selfcare a path in the pursue of more health, damage reduction and improvement in the quality of life. The study’s objective is to analyze the actions of selfcare accomplished by the patients with Diabetes Mellitus, that were treated in the primary health care. It is a descriptive, exploratory study with a quantitative approach. The testing place was on the Units of Family Health Strategy (FHS), from the North and South sanitary Districts of Natal. It was used a random, stratified sample with a confidence interval of 95% and margin of error of 5%, corresponding to 379 diabetics, and a total of 387 researched patients. The subjects had a diagnosis of diabetes at 18 years old, registered in the researched Health Units. A Term of Consent was used, according to the Resolution 466/12 of the National Health Council. The instruments used were two: the first, having questions about the unit’s characterization, alongside the administrator; and, the second, made by two parts: the first, with socioeconomical variables and the second, containing questions about the activities of the selfcare with diabetes (QAD). The descriptive statistical analysis, with average, medium, standard deviation and the Student’s application of a parametric test t for a significance level of 5%, regarding the comparison of the QAD items by region. The gathered data were analyzed from the software Statistica SPSS, version 20.0. The results showed that by studied region the majority of the interviewed were from the North District (91.73%), the predominance of an age group higher than 60 years old (53.23%), female (71.06%), married (49.87%), with more than five years of diabetes diagnosis (53.75%), that did not attend to the support meetings (90.44%), mostly because there was no reunion at all inside the Health Unit (32.29%). The majority affirm to know about the selfcare (50.13%) and carry out selfcare actions regarding diabetes (68.22%). In relation to the results about selfcare with diabetes (QAD) based on the seven days of the week, the items related to medication had higher number of days of executed actions (6,39), meanwhile the actions related to physical activity (1.10) and glycemia control (0.97), were the least executed actions. When compared to the researched districts the evidences about statistical differences, based on the seven days of the week related to following a healthy diet (4.94), ingesting red meat and/or whole milk derivatives (3.34) and accomplish physical activities for at least 30 minutes (2.56). The results pointed out the most and least accomplished selfcare activities by the disease carriers, as well as, the existing difficulties, and indicate a few characteristics of the health units, that can hamper the daily support alongside the patients These results contribute to an improvement of the patient’s care, by identifying the mainly difficulties in the selfcare actions, as well as make it possible to identify the need of care protocols guided towards the patient’s selfcare.