Self-Care and Home Oral Chemotherapy: Evaluation of Nurses' Educational Practices from the Perspective of Patients

Abstract

Introduction: Given the real life of the patients, the best way of acquiring knowledge for self-care was examined. Objective: To evaluate, from the perspective of the patients, convergences and divergences between orientations for self-care, understanding of the orientations and their application. Method: Evaluative study, from a hermeneutic-dialectic perspective, at a cancer hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen participants with colon and rectum cancer formed the sample, distributed into three groups (initial, central and final cycles) of the XELOX treatment protocol. Convenience sampling was adopted, with the following criteria: adult, treatment consciousness, lucidity, preserved cognitive functions, absence of cerebral metastasis and oral home chemotherapy. Data were produced using semi-structured interviews between September and October 2012, until theoretical saturation was reached, in a cooperation between participants and researchers to illuminate the experience to be explored. Results: Eighty-nine speech extracts grouped into three empirical categories and their respective subcategories, namely: the orientation-to-understanding category, with eight subcategories; the description of educational practices category, with four subcategories; and the understanding the application category, with 11 subcategories. Conclusion: As there are possible improvements throughout the process, in the transition from one stage to the next, we propose a previous activity to identify sociocultural factors, a later activity of avaliative feature and monitoring activities between one cycle and the next.