Impact Of Digital Educational Program On Clinical Outcomes Among Hypertensive Pregnant Women

Abstract

This study aims to identify the impact of clinical pharmacist’s digital educational program on drug adherence and clinical outcomes among Malaysian hypertensive pregnant women. A quasi-experimental study was undertaken at the antenatal clinic of Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia (HUSM). The study was carried out with 51 hypertensive pregnant women who were conveniently interviewed. The intervention was an educational program that included 4 video clips and 30 short educational messages. The educational program was started immediately after recruitment through sending the video clips and short messages by WhatsApp application. Descriptive and inferential analyses were performed using SPSS version 22. Total score of drug adherence domain and diastolic blood pressure among hypertensive pregnant women showed significant improvements after the intervention ( P =0.001, P<0.001), respectively. The study reinforced the essential role of the clinical pharmacist in patient education. Moreover, using digital technology to deliver a structured educational program for hypertensive pregnant women was an effective method in increasing drug adherence rate and improving diastolic blood pressure.

Keywords: Pregnant womenWhatsAppHypertensionDigital Education

Introduction

Pharmacists are specialists in medications and can play a main role in the health care system due to their accessibility, experience, and expertise. Patient education and counselling is the main pillar in pharmaceutical care and must be achieved in highly professional and suitable ways.

Patients education is not basically transferring certain information to patients and then asking them to follow up the instructions. However, effective education could be achieved by motivating patients for education by using simple, convenient, and enjoyable educational tools (Jahromi, 2016).

Nowadays, people are lucky since they are living in an era of technology that changed their life in different ways. For an instant, using digital technology in education make it more convenient, attractive and effective. As well, using smartphones in patient’s education is an important addition to education (Short, Lin, Merianos, Burke, & Upperman, 2014) because these phones are widely used among the community and have many grateful features such as simplicity, movability, ability to update, and compatibility to different social applications. WhatsApp is one of the most public social media applications. In Malaysia, using WhatsApp is very common and appropriate among all population ages and classes.

Problem Statement

Pregnant women usually rely on their experience, internet, family or friends as main sources of health information. Thereby, they might use untrusted drug information resources that lead to wrong, incomplete or misleading information that consequently increase the harmful risks on their health and their unborn baby (Finer & Henshaw, 2006; Nordeng, Ystrøm, & Einarson, 2010).

Moreover, the traditional methods of patient’s education might face many obstacles which might influence on the educational process such as working overload, insufficient time, lack of privacy places, and a shortage of health professional staff (Al Laif, Ahmad, Naqvi, & Ahmad, 2017).

On the other side, the studies about drug adherence in pregnant women are scattered and vary among different countries. It was noticeable that more than 50% of pregnant women using medications for chronic diseases were non-adherent (Sawicki et al., 2011). Also, the non-adherence rate in the pregnant population is much higher than the general population (DiMatteo, 2004).

In Malaysia, particularly in Kelantan region (area of study), the rate of hypertension disorders among pregnant women was 3.52% in 2012 (NOR, 2012). Hypertension in pregnancy has many complications on mother. Therefore, hypertension is considered the most common cause of maternal mortality and morbidity (Khan, Wojdyla, Say, Gülmezoglu, & Van Look, 2006; Roberts, Pearson, Cutler, & Lindheimer, 2003). According to National Obstetrics Registry third report 2011-2012, Ministry of Health Malaysia, the average incidence of hypertension in pregnancy-related maternal death was 13.6% from 1997 to 2008.

Research Questions

Would the digital educational program improve hypertensive pregnant women’s drug adherence rate and their clinical outcomes?

Purpose of the Study

To measure the impact of clinical pharmacist’s educational program using digital technology on drug adherence rate and clinical outcome among hypertensive pregnant women in Kelantan, Malaysia.

Research Methods

Findings

Only 39 pregnant women, out of 51 patients completed all the study phases. All participants were Malay with age of more than thirty years old. As well, most of them were living in a village, had an unplanned pregnancy and had a secondary education level. Moreover, majority of them were in the last gestational age when they participated in the study and most of them never visit or had only one visit to the dental clinic during pregnancy. However, it was necessary to say that; none of all participants was smoker or alcohol drinker (Table 01 ).

Nevertheless, while most of the pregnant women reported that they did not use self-medication during pregnancy, paracetamol was the common drug used as over the counter (OTC) drug (30.8%) followed by aspirin (10.3%) (Figure 01 ).

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As well, the primary sources of drug information among most of participants were the physicians followed by the internet, and family/friends whereas only a small percentage of pregnant women (12.8%) who rely on pharmacists as a source of drug information as illustrated in Figure 02 .

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When the clinical outcomes of pregnant women measured at different periods (baseline, end of the intervention, and follow up), a significant improvement in diastolic blood pressure was noticed ( P <0.001) (Table 02 ).

Similarly, significant improvement was seen among participants with low drug adherence level where their number at this level significantly decreased at the end of the intervention ( P =0.012) (Table 03 ).

Conclusion

Using digital technology in education is an effective method which significantly improved drug adherence rate and diastolic blood pressure among hypertensive pregnant women. The study pointed out the important role of the digital technology in education processes and using it as a tool for delivery the educational material was effective and promising.

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