Web-Based Symptom Management to Improve Long-Term Symptom Experience and Health-Related Quality of Life for Living Liver Donors: a Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial

Maintain and promote the health status is the important goal of liver transplantation team. Living liver donor may experience some symptom distress after the surgery. Poor symptom management may negative impact the long-term health-related quality of life of living liver donors. Web-based symptom management may help living donor to learn how to manage their symptom specific and continually. The effect of web-based symptom management need further investigated. The Symptom Management Theory is used as theoretical framework for this study. The aim of this study is to test the effect of a web-based symptom management on long-term symptom experience and health-related quality of life of living liver donors. Method: this study is a randomized controlled trial. The study setting is a surgical ward and outpatient clinic of a medical center at northern Taiwan. The convenience sampling method is used to recruit sample in this study. The inclusion criteria are: age 20 and older, receive living liver donor surgery, agree and consent to participate. Donors who experience major surgical complication need hospitalization will be excluded. Following completion of the baseline measures, participants will randomly (using computer assistant) with equal allocation (1:1) to experimental group and control group (total sample size 92, 46 in each group). Control group receive the usual instruction of post-surgery care. Participants in the experimental group receive the usual care plus web-based symptom management intervention. Participants complete the electronic questionnaire to identify their specific symptoms. These symptoms are the focus of the intervention. The information of symptom management and self-care will draw from the evidence-based of care guideline or study reports. The web-site also set communication and alert function in order to facilitate the efficacy of symptom management. The primary outcomes of this study are symptom distress and health-related quality of life. The Living Liver Donor Symptom Scale, Brief Pain Inventory, FACIT-Fatigue scale, Hospital Depression and Anxiety scale, and MOS SF-12 health-related quality of life are used to collect data. Data will collect prospectively at pre-operation (baseline), before discharge (post-surgery), and 1, 3, 6, 12, 24 months post-surgery. The linear mixed model (LMM) will use to test the effect of the web-based symptom management intervention on primary outcome over time. Hope this study will provide the information of long-term outcome of living liver donors prospectively by providing the recovery trajectory of symptom experience and health-related quality within 2 years after surgery. We also hope this study could promote the quality of care of transplant team by establish and test the effect of a web-based symptom management intervention.

Project ID:PC10701-1119
External Project ID:MOST106-2314-B182-007-MY2