ABSTRACT
Background: IBD is a chronic immune-mediated disease that requires continuous patient care. The frequent contact and the good relationship with the multidisciplinary team (MDT) are essential for improving quality of life (QoL) and medication adherence aiming at treatment success. The aim of the study was to assess the importance of MDT in the view of patients with IBD and its impact on QoL and in medication adherence. Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out, including 114 patients from an IBD reference center in Brazil. The relevance of MDT was assessed through a questionnaire that included the importance of physicians, nurses, nutritionists and psychologists in the patient care. QoL was assessed by IBDQ. Treatment adherence and knowledge about the disease were assessed using the Morisky and CCKNOW questionnaires, respectively. Results: In total, 69 (60.53%) patients with CD and 45 (39.47%) patients with UC were included. The mean age was 39.16 (±13.50) years and 58.77% were female. The disease duration was 9.88 (±7.35) years. Presence of comorbidities was observed in 52.63% patients. About 57 (82.61%) patients with CD use biological therapy, with a statistical difference (p <0.0001) when compared to patients with UC (37.78%). The gastroenterologist was considered very important by 91.23% of patients, coloproctologist by 62.07% of patients, nurse by 65.05% of patients, nutritionist by 50% of patients and psychologist by 47.25% of patients. In the analysis of QoL, 24 (21.05%) patients had excellent QoL, 52 (45.61%) had good QoL, 29 (25.44%) had regular QoL and 9 (7.89%) had poor QoL, with no difference between patients who followed with nurses or other MDT professionals (Table 1). Medication adherence was low in 58.88% of patients. Knowledge about the disease was low (6.21 ± 3.99 points), being higher among patients with CD (p = 0.01). Patients identify the doctor as the main provider of care for their health, but about 10% leave with doubts from their appointments. 10% of patients think that more care with the nurse is necessary and less than 10% of patients are clarified by the nurse about QoL, ostomies, fecal incontinence, disease activity, biological therapy and sexuality. Conclusion: Patients considered doctors as the most important professionals in their care. Although the service has a multidisciplinary team, not all patients had the opportunity to consult with all professionals, mainly do the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The lack of contact with the entire team, especially with the nurse, may have contributed to low medication adherence and low knowledge of the disease, impacting disease control and QoL.
ABSTRACT
Regarding the current social state and the benefits of social distancing, this paper intends to use technology, namely mobile and web applications, to control the flow of people in institutional spaces, namely the management of students at Polytechnic Institute of Viseu. The idea is to use QR codes distributed in spaces (classrooms, libraries) so that it is possible to carry out monitoring in real-time. When a professor or student attends a specific room, information about the number of people in that location will be updated in the app. Thus, it will be possible to count the number of students present in each space and carry out the automatic registration of students’ attendance per class, removing the professor’s concern about registering them. The application will also be able to effectively control the sanitation of each space since alerts will be issued at the end of each class to the administrator of the web application. As for the web part, the responsible institution will be able to make the schedules of the different shifts available to students via the website to enroll in these shifts and access information regarding the number of people who intend to attend a specific class. In this way, it will possibly be better to manage academic sites in terms of social distance. © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.