Effectiveness of Psychosocial Nursing Care on Negative Symptoms, Quality of Life of Persons with Schizophrenia and Attitude of the Primary Care Givers Towards the Patient: A Pilot Report

Schizophrenia is a major mental disorder with varied symptoms like positive, negative and cognitive symptoms. These symptoms blow the client and their family members in various ways. Becoming dependent on the family members, inability to take the family roles and responsibilities, unproductive life create burden for the families and depreciate   the quality of life of the clients. Psychopharmacological agents along with the psychosocial interventions knotted together were found to be valuable for the treatment of these symptoms. A quasi-experimental design was conducted with the aim to find out the effectiveness of psychosocial nursing care on negative symptoms, quality of life of the persons with schizophrenia and attitude of primary care givers towards the patient. Socio demographic & clinical pro forma, family attitude scale and WHOQOL-BREF were used to measure the variables. Psychosocial nursing care was implemented for both the clients and primary care givers for experimental group. Negative symptoms were assessed before the intervention, just after the intervention and at one month after the intervention. Family attitude and Quality of life were assessed before and one month after the intervention. Same process was adopted for control group without the intervention. The experimental group showed a significant statistical difference in negative symptoms at pre test, first post test and second post test following psychosocial nursing interventions F=137.87(2),p<0.001. The paired ‘t’ test showed no significant difference in post test family attitude score for experimental ‘t’=2.893, P>0.05.No significant difference in quality of life score was found in the post test score for both the group. The findings from the study showed that along with the psychotropic medications various psychosocial nursing interventions were effective to reduce the negative symptoms. However, further studies with larger sample size may provide better inference for the effectiveness of psychosocial nursing care