| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北護理健康大學 === 長期照護研究所 === 103 === Under the trend of aging society, long-term care issues have attracted global
attention, and oral health care of patients receiving long-term care is one of the
important issues. The implementation of oral self-care of patients receiving long-term
home care is usually affected by disease-induced impaired physical activity and
cognitive dysfunction. In addition to causing many oral situations, poor oral hygiene
may easily cause systemic disease and other serious complications that lead to death.
Therefore, oral care is a very important health issue to patients receiving long-term
home care, as well as the most fundamental, critical, and urgently important issue in
daily life care for family caregivers to assist in taking care of patients.
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the oral health and hygiene
behavior of family caregivers for patients receiving home care and understand
relevant factors affecting it. This cross-sectional study used purposively sampling to
enroll the patients receiving home care and family caregivers at home care nursing
institutes of a certain hospital in the northern Taiwan as the subjects. This study used
the oral health inspection form and structured questionnaires whose expert validity
was verified domestically and overseas to collect data. A total of 117 subjects
completed this study. The measurement questionnaires used in this study included:
oral health inspection form for patients receiving home care and scale on oral health
knowledge, attitude, and behavior or family caregivers. The reliability and validity of
the questionnaires were both effectively verified. This study used SPSS19.0 to
perform statistical analyses on the data.
The research results included: the number of remaining teeth of patients
receiving home care was: 13.0+10.4 teeth. The full mouth toothless rate was 18.0%.
Most of the patients receiving home care experienced the situations of plaque, fur, and tartar. For the implementation of oral health behavior of patients receiving home care:
(1) all of the patients relied on the assistance from family caregivers, and care
relationship was mainly foreign caregivers (75%). (2) The scores of knowledge (K),
attitude (A), and implementation (performance) behavior (P) of oral health care of
family caregivers were correlated with one another. This study found that, the higher
the score of oral health care knowledge of family caregivers was, the better their
attitude towards implementing oral health care was and the better their performance of
oral health behavior was. Moreover, (3) for the predictors of family caregivers’
implementation of oral health care behavior, this study found that, the higher the
educational level of family caregivers was, the better their oral health knowledge was
and the better their oral health care behavior for patients was.
According to the research results, it is advised to: (1) combine the home visits
of oral hygienists and dentists with future home care to develop and promote the
service model of “home health care” to provide patients with proper oral health status
assessment. It is advised to increase the instruction of family caregivers’ oral health
care, especially when most of the patients receiving home care rely on the care and
assistance of foreign caregivers. Therefore, it is also advised to attach particular
importance to and strengthen oral care instruction for “foreign caregivers’ care skill
training,” including tooth cleaning methods and skills for patients with special needs,
care timing and handling of special situations, and knowledge concerning oral and
systemic diseases, in order to provide complete oral educational training and improve
the oral health care quality for patients receiving home care.
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