The whole world is in the grip of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. This pandemic brought visible changes in the life of humans around the globe. Likewise, the medical health sector is forced to use digital technology to continue to provide medical health services by preventing themselves. COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the significance of digitalization in every sphere of life. By focusing on virtual care at a large scale, health care delivery becomes possible and convenient even for remote places. The use of artificial intelligence concepts in this pandemic, like robots replaced human movements and function automatically to guide the patients in the reception area and found helpful to prevent and manage the crowd in a few countries. Similarly, the use of e-earning platform has emerged as a digital solution to impart medical education to medical students in this corona outbreak.
Objectives
This study examines the body image distress among patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) visiting a tertiary care hospital for follow-ups.
Design
A cross-sectional survey purposively enrolled 170 head and neck cancer (HNC) patients who had undergone cancer surgery at a newly established tertiary care hospital, North India.
Methods
A structured pre-tested socio-demographic and clinical profile checklist and the Derriford Appearance Scale-24 (DAS-24) were used to collect information. An appropriate descriptive and inferential statistic was applied to compute the findings.
Results
The median age of the participants was 46.0 years, and 80% of the participants were unemployed. The mean body image distress score was 57.95 (
SD
= 10.3, 47–66.75, range 42–77). The body image distress shows a significant association with age (
p
< .001), gender (
p
= 0.003), and working status (
p
= 0.032) of the HNC patients. Multilinear regression reported gender as an independent predictor (95%
CI
: 0.615–8.646,
p
= 0.025) for body image distress in HNC patients.
Conclusions
HNC patients reported substantial body image distress due to changes in body appearance. Female patients who had undergone surgery at young age reported higher body image distress. Recommending cosmetic surgery and nurse-led psychosocial nursing intervention on routine follow-ups are other potential strategies to improve facial appearance to overcome the negative impact of body image.
Nurse-led clinics. Today's nurses are empowered with competency and knowledge, act as backbone of the hospitals. To overcome the shortage of doctors in developing countries, there is need to focus on the utilization of nursing services and knowledge in the areas where they are enriched with core competencies needed for patient care. Nurse-led clinics appears to be an innovative ideas where the health needs of patients can be fulfilled in timely and cost effective manner. But, there is a need to broaden the scope of nursing curriculum by adding more concepts like competency based modules and critical thinking among nurses.
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