Empowerment of Premenopausal women regarding knowledge on Cardiac Health in selected Self Help Women Groups Mangalore

Heart disease is the number one cause of death among women. Although 450000 women die annually from it, this fact is unknown to many women. Because heart disease is frequently preventable, increasing awareness of personal risk and preventative measures is a key element of healthcare for women. Nurse clinicians can evaluate, educate, and counsel women regarding their risk for this pervasive disease and promote behaviour changes that will decrease that risk. The present investigation was aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of empowerment programme on cardiac health among the premenopausal women’s and to find out an association between pre-test knowledge scores with selected demographic variables among premenopausal women. The research design used in the study was pre–experimental one group pre-test post-test and non-probability convenient sampling technique was used to draw sample. The data was collected from 100 premenopausal women using the structured knowledge questionnaire. Empowerment programme was conducted and post-test was administered after 7days using the same structured knowledge questionnaire to find out the effectiveness of empowerment programme. The results revealed that the overall mean percentage knowledge score in the pre-test and post-test were 35.70% and 61.22% respectively. Enhancement mean percentage knowledge score was found to be 25.52%. The statistical paired ‘t’ test (t= 47.74) indicates that enhancement in the mean percentage knowledge score was found to be significant at 0.05 level for all the aspects under study. The association found to be significant between pre-test knowledge scores & selected socio demographic variables such as age, educational status, occupation, history of diabetes mellitus and information about cardiac disease at 0.05 levels (P< 0.05). There is no significant association between pre-test knowledge score and demographical variable such as religion, income, marital status and family history of cardiac disease.