Living with chronic illness requires """"""""work"""""""" or the expenditure of energy to maintain health and emotional stability. Thus, needs for social support, information, and reassurance are intensified. As health care shifts to a community-based approach in which care is provided in places convenient to those being served and the focus is on prevention, creative mechanisms to deliver care are needed. Social support has been demonstrated to have a positive influence on dealing with illness. Support from others who have experienced the same health problem is of particular benefit. An effective and efficient means of providing support is through self-help groups, as has been demonstrated by Alcoholics Anonymous, etc. Yet, in rural areas, distance, travel time, small population base, and weather conditions often prohibit establishing and maintaining support and exchange among those managing chronic illness. The goal of the project is to use telecommunication technology to provide an innovative nursing intervention to provide information and mutual support to middle-aged isolated rural women living with chronic illness and to evaluate the impact of participation in these support groups on the women's psychosocial health. The telecommunication intervention is implemented with personal computers and the """"""""FirstClass"""""""" conferencing system: """"""""Conversation"""""""", """"""""HealthChat"""""""", """"""""Mailbox"""""""", and """"""""Resource Rack"""""""". Over the course of the project 120 rural women will be randomized into either the intervention or control group (four cohorts of 15 intervention and 15 control). Each cohort will participate for 10 months. The intervention group will use the telecommunication intervention for 5 months and the control group will continue to use their usual mode of support and communication. At baseline, 2 1/2, 5, 7 1/2, and 10 months both groups participate in telephone interviews and will complete questionnaires to measure psychosocial outcomes. The change in psychosocial outcomes between baseline and five months is hypothesized to be more positive for the women in the intervention group than for the women in the control group. To assess the intervention group participants' attitudes toward the telecommunication intervention, a questionnaire will be administered during the sixth month.
| Cudney, Shirley; Weinert, Clarann (2012) An online approach to providing chronic illness self-management information. Comput Inform Nurs 30:110-7 |
| Weinert, Clarann; Cudney, Shirley; Spring, Amber (2008) Evolution of a conceptual model for adaptation to chronic illness. J Nurs Scholarsh 40:364-72 |
