The Faculty of Nursing at Chiang Mai University is leading the way in innovative nursing education and we are proud to have 8 of the 16 full nursing professors among nursing institutions in Thailand practicing here. Dr. Patraporn Tungpunkom, the most recent member to receive this academic distinction, has worked at FON for nineteen years and will be awarded full professorship in the next round of appointments. This October she will also be inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN) in Washington, DC.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Patraporn is Director of the Thailand Center for Evidence-Based Health Care. She has a special interest in developing supports for the caregivers of people with chronic mental illness. She sees them as both the most important part of the patient’s care, and the hidden victims of the stigma surrounding mental illness, often coping in difficult circumstances with little support from the wider community. Her research confirmed that family caregivers have not been taken into account as a key part of the long term care regime when it comes to training nurses and health workers about mental health care. When she looked at the curriculum there was no focus on the caregiving skills required in the vital role of family caregiver, so she set about researching solutions to this issue. She began by interviewing 30 mothers who take care of their schizophrenic sons and daughters at home. By analyzing their experiences, she identified the 14 core skills they relied upon to keep their loved ones as well and healthy as possible. She then set about transferring that knowledge into clinical practice by developing a training program based on these skills and testing it in the field.
The training program teaches psychiatric nurses to train caregivers in families of patients with schizophrenia. Family caregivers learn more about the condition and how to help patients with 3 main tasks, including: daily living, symptom management, and medication management tasks. This includes training on how to apply the 14 caregiving skills across those three core tasks in order to provide the best possible care at home. Nurse trainees receive illustrated, easy-to-follow manuals and an accompanying DVD with demonstrations of the core skills, that they can use to educate patients and caregivers. There are also illustrated manuals for the family caregivers to take home. For ongoing peer-support, the nurse trainers, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Patraporn and colleagues use LINE, a web-based application popular in Asia, to communicate and discuss concerns. This has proven to be a useful tool as the training is implemented with their patients.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Patraporn coordinates with Suan Prung Psychiatric Hospital, the hospital under the Mental Health Department for the Ministry of Public Health, to invite networked hospitals to send psychiatric nurses to CMU to participate in the caregiver training. To date 84 nurses from 13 provinces in Northern Thailand have taken part in this training program. The nurse trainers have since gone on to train a further 300 home caregivers and the people in their care. The applicability and efficacy of the program has been assessed using the Roger's Innovation-Diffusion model. This model measures how easy it is for nurses to incorporate the training into their routine work and to measure the skills development and the levels of stress experienced by the caregivers as they take their new skills into their home environment. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Patraporn checks to see how the new skills are helping with medication adherence, the level of schizophrenic symptoms in the patients and relapse rates of the patients following the training. The results indicate a high level of satisfaction with the program. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Patraporn is submitting the resulting research for publication and she intends to make it available in Thai, English, Japanese and Chinese.