Sexual Health Educational Needs of Hysterectomy Patients

Shin, Hye Sook; Song, Young A

Abstract

Sexual health education for the patients is an independent function as well as a professional responsibility of nurses. Education should be based on the needs of patients in order to be successful and effective. Therefore nurses must identify sexual health education needs of their patients. A sexual health education protocol for hysterectomy patients was developed by the researcher for this study and included physiosexual and psychosexual topics as well as the topic of sexual interaction. The subject pool was composed of 108 post op total hysterectomy patients who had undergone doing a hysterectomy 5 to 10 days previously at 5 hospitals located in the Seoul and Kyunggi-do area from July 23 to September 30, 2001.The questionnaire was composed of 60 items on sexual health education and used a Likert-type 4-point scale. Internal consistency of this questionnaire in this study was cronbach's aloha=.9495 for sexual health educational needs. For data analysis, the study executed a t-test, ANOVA, and Duncan's Test, in accordance with the purpose of the study using SPSS/PC Win 10.0. The results were as follows: The need for education was highest in the psychosexual area (3.38 point) with education related to sexual interaction the lowest (3.20 point). Osteoporosis (3.75 point) was ranked overall as the highest area of educational need. The degree of educational need varied in correlation with other characteristics of the patients including age, status of marriage, duration of marriage, religion, academic career, monthly income, occupation, the number of children age of menarche, menstruation, other diseases except gynecological disease, previous genital organ operation experience, disease discovery method, pre-explanation for the hysterectomy, average sexual intercourse frequency, how to acquire sexual health information and previous sexual health education (p<.05). In conclusion, the degree of sexual health education needs of hysterectomy patients was very high. Therefore, sexual health educational programs planned according to characteristics of the participating women is necessary.