Iman Abdullah Mohammed Abdulmutalib^1,, Elham Abdullah Al Nagshabandi², Salma Khader Abdullah Alansari³

Patients with intestinal ostomy suffer from some complications and changes in their life after surgery. This is due to lack of knowledge, preoperative preparation, and postoperative management. As a result, education play a major role in enhancing, educating, and improving patient’s knowledge and self-care practice with the intestinal ostomy. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the effect of an educational protocol on knowledge and self-care practices among patients with the intestinal ostomy. A quasi-experimental design was used. A purposive sample of 50 patients at King Abdulaziz University Hospital and King Fahad General Hospital in the general surgical, medical department and outpatient clinic. The data was collected through the main two tools developed by the researchers. Tool I: Patients' interviewing questionnaire, it is divided into two parts, Part I: Sociodemographic characteristics and clinical data. Part II: Knowledge assessment questionnaire to assess patients` knowledge about intestinal ostomy. Tool II: A structure observation checklist to assess self-care practices. The study results revealed that there was a highly significant difference between the pre and immediate post of implementing an educational protocol regarding all items knowledge with (p=0.00). Furthermore, there was a statistically significant difference between immediate post and after one month of implementing an educational protocol regarding knowledge items of emptying the pouch bag, nutrition/dietary instructions, number of measurement stoma after six weeks of surgery, and common complications with p=0.013, 0.019, 0.03, and 0.01 respectively. On the other hand, there is an improvement in all items of self-care practices, comparing the level between pre and post immediate, as well as comparing the level between the immediate post and after one month of implementing an educational protocol. This means that all patients able to self-care practices successfully after education. It was concluded that the implementation of an educational protocol has a positive effect on knowledge and self-care practices among patients with the intestinal ostomy immediately post and after one month later. These findings justified the research hypothesis. It was a recommended that self-care practices are an important part for the adaptation of patients with stomas after surgery so that planned self-care education should be given to patients before their discharge.

stoma, intestinal ostomy, education protocol