Knowledge, attitude, and practices of high-blood-pressure patients attended at Mutare city clinics in Manicaland province in 2022–2023

Abstract

Objective: The low socioeconomic status of Mutare city patients, shortage of medical staff, and lack of supported hypertension programs expose clients to poor or lack of counseling services; hence, the present study aimed to investigate the knowledge, attitude, and practices among those hypertensive patients.

Materials and methods: A cross-sectional correlational investigation was conducted to find the amount of knowledge about hypertension on hypertensive clients and the association between hypertension knowledge and good blood pressure management. All the hypertensive patients who were diagnosed at least 2 months prior to the study were included. A sample of 88 participants was used for this study. Convenience quota sampling was used where every clinic out of the 8 clinics should have supplied 11 hypertensive clients. Data were collected using a structured interviewer administered questionnaire. Logistics regression analysis was done, and odds ratio was used to assess the relationship of variables. The statistical level of significance was set at P < 0.05.

Discussion and results: A total of 80% of the participants were concluded to have good hypertension knowledge. Those who had at least a discussion with a health worker were 9.31 (p-value 0.005) folds more prone to reflect good knowledge than patients who never had a discussion about hypertension. Those who were 50 years and above were less likely to possess good knowledge in comparison to clients below 50 years of age (odds ratio 0.21, P-value 0.049).

Conclusion: There is a wrong belief of hypertensive medication causing diabetes, being addictive and traditional, with herbal medicines being cure to hypertension, and those with well-controlled blood pressure were found to have poorer knowledge compared to those with poorly controlled blood pressures.