Effect Of Nurse-Led Psycho-Education On Family Knowledge Regarding Factors Associated With Relapse In Psychiatric Patients

Background: Patients with some specific psychiatric challenges require long courses of drug treatment to improve their psychological symptoms and prevent relapses. However, patients who live in local communities after being discharged are often repeatedly hospitalized due to relapses caused by poor medication adherence, poor family support, poor interpersonal relationships, and stressful life events. This study investigates the effect of Nurse-led psycho-education on the Knowledge of caregivers on factors associated with mental illness relapse in Neuro-Hospital Akure. Method: This study is a quasi-experimental study conducted among sixty-six family caregivers of patients with mental illness at the Neuro-psychiatric Hospital. The data was obtained in three phases: pre-intervention phase, intervention phase and post-intervention phase and processed using SPSS version 25. Analysis was done using descriptive statistics such as frequency and valid percent. The hypotheses were tested using a t-test at 0.05 level of significance. Results: There is a significant difference between pre and post-intervention knowledge on patients-induced factors associated with mental illness relapse (t65=9621; p-value= .000), knowledge on caregiver-induced factors associated with mental illness relapse (t65=3.811; p-value= .009) and knowledge on environmental-induced factors associated with mental illness relapse (t65=1.163; p-value= .081). Conclusion: Psychoeducational intervention was instrumental in increasing knowledge on patient-induced, caregiver-induced and environmental-induced factors associated with mental illness relapse during postintervention. Mental health nurses need to strategically prepare psycho-educational for caregivers of patients during clinic sessions to enable them to prevail over patients to avoid any form of relapse.