Relationship between Quality of life and self care ability in patients receiving hemodialysis

Although hemodialysis has a therapeutic effect on ESRD, but these patients encounter many physical, psychological, and social stress full factors that lead to a decrease in their quality of life (QOL). One of the factors that are effective on increasing of QOL is self care ability. Review of literature demonstrates that there have been done a few studies on different aspects of QOL in ESRD patients under hemodialysis and their relationship with self care ability in Iran. So in this research beside of determining the quality of life and its dimensions and self care ability of hemodialysis patients, we evaluated their relationship with each other. For this purpose, all hemodialysis patients who had inclusion criteria and were hospitalized in hemodialysis wards of Bonab, Maragheh, and Miandoab hospitals; were selected and data were collected by interview using a questionnaire including three parts of demographic, quality of life, and self care ability. The results indicated that quality of life in 34%, and self care ability in 78/3% of hemodialysis patients were desirable, and there was a direct and significant relationship between these two variables (p< 0.001, r = 0.4), as self care ability explained 29% of variance of QOL. In quality of life subsectors, social dimension in 98/3% of patients was desirable, while physical dimension (80%) and psychological dimension (63/5%) in most of the patients were undesirable. Physical dimension was the most impressible dimension of quality of life from self care ability; whereas self care ability explained 27% of total variance of physical dimension of QOL Nearly two third of mentioned patients had not desirable quality of life and regarding the positive relationship between QOL and self care ability, it is suggested that health care planner and managers would prepare the condition that through educating and reinforcing self care ability in these patients improve the quality of life in hemodialysis patients.