Factors Affecting Self-care Maintenance and Management in Patients With Heart Failure: Testing a Path Model

Self-care is indispensable for health maintenance and well-being. This naturalistic decision-making process involves behavioral choices to maintain physiological stability (self-care maintenance) and response to occurring symptoms (self-care management). However, several factors affect self-care, but some have contradictory results.

We aimed to examine how depressive symptoms, social support, eHealth literacy, and heart failure (HF) knowledge directly and indirectly affect self-care maintenance and management and to identify the mediating role of self-care confidence in self-care maintenance and management.

The study included a total of 141 patients with HF (average age, 65.2 years; male, 55.3%). We analyzed their data, including demographic and clinical characteristics, obtained from the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, eHealth Literacy Scale, Dutch Heart Failure Knowledge Scale, and Self-Care of Heart Failure Index. Furthermore, path analysis was conducted to examine the effects of the study variables on self-care maintenance and management.

Self-care confidence significantly and directly affected self-care maintenance and management and mediated the relationships between factor variables (depressive symptoms, social support, and HF knowledge) and outcome variables (self-care maintenance and management). Specifically, depressive symptoms had a negative and direct effect on self-care maintenance, whereas eHealth literacy had significant and direct effects on self-care management and HF knowledge.

Self-care confidence decreases the negative effects of depressive symptoms on self-care. This study underscores the need for interventions targeting patients' self-care confidence to maximize self-care among patients with HF.