Life experiences of pulmonary tuberculosis patients affected by delays in treatment, Thailand
Keywords:
Life experience, Delay, Pulmonary TuberculosisAbstract
A qualitative research aimed to describe consequences of delays in treatment among 25 pulmonary TB patients who came to get treatment at the TB clinic in hospitals under the Nakhon Ratchasima Provincial Public Health Office during October 1 - December 30, 2018. The data were collected by in-depth interview, analysed by the content analysis and managed with a qualitative data analysis computer software package.
The findings showed that consequences of delays in treatment were categorized into 2 main consequences: intra-personal consequences and inter-personal consequences. For the intra-personal consequences, patients suffered from the consequences of the delays in terms of health condition as they had more severe symptoms before getting TB treatment. It could affect their daily-life and working that they needed to stop working or leave from their job for a while. Moreover, they had predicted the results of having longer period of the delays that it could result in an increase of advanced and severe symptoms which may lead them to die. In terms of inter-personal consequences, patients had opinions that they could spread the disease to close contact especially in family, community, or society. However, some patients thought that they could not spread TB germs to others because results of TB screening tests were not found TB infection.
In conclusion, these findings may help to improve the TB controlling strategies in terms of exchanging knowledge and experiences of these patients in both intra-personal and inter-personal consequences. People should be encouraged to gain more correct knowledge, perception, and awareness about TB. This can help TB suspected get early TB screening and treatment which will help to reduce severity and mortality rate among new pulmonary TB patients and well as transmission rate among other people.
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