Psychological Impact of Counselling Intervention Program of Sample of People Attending Primary Health Care Centers in Erbil City

Abstract

Background: Cardiovascular disease is one of the largest health issues threatening people's lives in the globe today. These illnesses are the primary cause of death in several states.

Objective: The goal of this study is to assess the impact of a counseling intervention program on cardiovascular disease incidence and mortality among the people of the Erbil Governorate.

 Subjects and methods: In order to evaluate the efficacy of the counseling intervention program, pre-post intervention studies were carried out on a sample of participants who attended 29 primary health care centers in Erbil city affiliated to the Erbil Health Directorate, Kurdistan Region of Iraq. 100 participants who accepted to participate in the intervention program had their baseline data collected. Each group had 50 participants and was randomly allocated to either the intervention group or the control group. Data was gathered between October 2021 and July 2022. Before implementing the program, the validity of the counselling intervention program was approved by cardiologists and specialists in this field. Prior to data collection, the necessary ethics permissions were obtained.

Results: Most of the participants were either in the age range 56-65.9 years (48.0%) of the control group or 46-55.9 years (30.0%) of the intervention group. According to the findings, both groups had a significant prevalence of high blood pressure (74.0% in the control group and 68.0% in the intervention group), and 94.0% of the control group members had diabetes. As a result of the study's findings, the majority of participants in both groups were taking medication to treat high cholesterol. Participants in the intervention group lost more weight than those in the control group (83 vs. 79, p-value.114) and experienced higher changes in their cholesterol and HbA1c (6.4 vs. 6.8, p-value.003) after three months of follow-up. Both triglycerides (214 vs 229 mg/dL, p-value.172) and HDL (45.6 vs 45.2 mg/dL, p-value.841) were significantly different. LDL-C reductions in the intervention group were higher than in the control group (122 vs. 134 mg/dL, p-value = 0.047).

Conclusions: The findings show that cardiovascular disease patients can adopt and maintain a variety of lifestyle modifications during the follow-up and counseling periods that can lower and regulate blood pressure and HbA1c, help them lose weight, and raise their HDL-C levels.