Assessment of quality of life of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy in a selected District Hospital in Rwanda

Abstract

Introduction &Background: Quality of life is the most important patient outcome among patients living with cancer. Quality of life helps in measuring nursing and medical interventions and also provides useful information concerning patients’ preferences, prognosis, unpleasant effects of cancer therapy. Previous research revealed that there is a decrease in quality of life and impact on physiological and psychological functioning of the cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. This study is aimed at assessing the quality of life of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy in a selected district hospital in Rwanda.To achieve this,the researcher assessed the quality of life of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy in selected Hospital basing on level of functional scale, symptoms scale and global health status/ QoL scale. Methods: This study was conducted at Butaro hospital. A quantitative cross-sectional descriptive design was used. 73cancer patients who met inclusion criteria participated in the study. The QoL -Core 30 vision 3.0 which is a self- administered questionnaire has been used to collect data and adapted to the setting .Data was coded and entered into SPSS version 20 for analysis. Descriptive statistics were calculated and results presented in the tables Results: The results indicated that the score of global health status/ QoL scale was low with transformed score mean and SD of 28.76(SD=20.03) , and score of symptoms scale was high 61,1(SD=17,10); these findings indicated low quality of life in our participants. However the score of functional scale was 51.55(SD=19.12) which indicated good quality of life. Conclusion: Qol scoring system showed that the quality of life of those patients was seriously impaired whereby majority of them reported financial difficulties, fatigue, pain, loss of appetite, insomnia and constipation. Those symptoms worsen the quality of life and this cause negative perception about chemotherapy. The researcher recommends further researchers to assess the effects of social demographic factors on quality of life.