Comprehensive assessment of AIDS patients using the behavioural systems model for nursing practice instrument

The major changes resulting from the AIDS diagnosis and illness were measured, described and classified in the Behavioural Systems Model's eight subsystems--achievement, affiliative, aggressiveness/protectiveness, dependence, ingestive, eliminative, restorative and sexual. Thirty male AIDS patients with Kaposi's Sarcoma were drawn as a convenience sample from a major medical centre's outpatient clinic. The subjects self-rated their perceived changes in the above eight major areas, using a 140-item instrument (DBSM) consisting of 24 categories of changes distributed in the above eight areas. Patients reported changes in all categories and described them in terms of direction, quality and relative importance. Ordinal ranks of changes existed among the eight major subsystems' frequency and importance of change scores, as shown by ANOVA and Tukey's studentized t-tests of rank.