Improving self-perception and self-efficacy in patients with spinal cord injury: the efficacy of DVD-based...

We assessed the effects of a spinal cord injury home rehabilitation DVD on patients with spinal cord injury.

Multimedia have been used widely in health care in the digital age. The provision of rehabilitation instructions is a major responsibility of the rehabilitation staff.

This study adopted a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design.

We collected data from a rehabilitation nursing ward at a medical centre between October 2011-April 2012. The participants were recruited before being discharged from the hospital. The experimental group (n = 28) received multimedia DVD instructions for three months, in addition to teaching sessions conducted by the researcher, whereas the control group (n = 31) received instructions without a DVD. Both groups completed the self-perception and self-efficacy scales used in this study before and after the intervention.

The results indicated that, after the multimedia DVD intervention, the experimental group exhibited a considerably greater improvement in self-perception than did the control group. Although we recorded increased scores for both self-perception and self-efficacy for both groups, no marked differences emerged between the control and the intervention groups by using a generalised estimating equation.

These results suggest that the home rehabilitation DVD is an effective instrument for improving self-perception and self-efficacy in patients with spinal cord injury. However, monitoring these patients over the long term is necessary.

Our study results confirmed that the spinal cord injury home rehabilitation DVD is a practical health education tool. We plan to use the proposed DVD intervention with a larger number of hospitalised patients, and to continuously monitor their improvement.