Hypertension related practices and compliance to anti-hypertensive therapy among hypertensive patients in tertiary health care facilities in Jos, North-Central Nigeria

Abstract

The study sought to assess hypertension related practices and to determine the level of compliance to antihypertensive therapy among hypertensive patients attending tertiary healthcare facilities in Jos, Nigeria. The study was conducted among consenting patients in Plateau State Specialist Hospital and Bingham University Teaching Hospital, both in Jos with the aid of a pretested structured questionnaire. It was a descriptive cross sectional survey of 275 hypertensive patients and systematic random sampling method was adopted. Data was analyzed with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) V. 20.0 to compute simple percentage, mean and standard deviation related to study objectives. Chi-square test was employed to investigate relationships among variables. The study had 50% with high hypertension-related practice levels with gender, religion, marital status, education level, and occupation showing probabilities of 0.622, 0.583, 0.900, 0.288, and 0.923 respectively. Patient compliance to antihypertensive therapy had a significantly high percentage (82%; P=0.0005). However, only 7.30% owned a personal blood pressure measuring machine. Hypertensive patients in the tertiary healthcare facilities in Jos demonstrated high level of knowledge of lifestyle practices and compliance to antihypertensive therapy. There is therefore need to maintain the health education and promotion practices of these hospitals to further improve the practice and compliance to antihypertensive therapy in patients through proper education by healthcare professionals.