Assessment of Follow-Up Care Received by Patients with Hypertension at Primary Health Care Facilities in Tshwane District of Gauteng Province, South Africa

Abstract

To extend the life expectancy of all South Africans to at least 70 years by 2030, hypertension follow-up care needs to be strengthened so that patients do not develop complications while in care. The aim of this study was to evaluate the follow-up care received by patients with hypertension at primary health care (PHC) facilities in Tshwane district. The study setting was ten PHC facilities in the aforesaid district. Quantitative, descriptive and retrospective methods were adopted, and simple random sampling was used to select ten PHC facilities from which ten files were conveniently sampled. Data were captured in Microsoft Excel 2010 and exported to IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 21 in which data coding, outlier detection, missing value analysis and statistical data analysis were performed. In line with the study aim, frequency tables in SPSS were used to produce frequency statistics, and the chi-square test was used to test for the presence of association between compliance by nurses to clinical guidelines and categories of attributes, and further determine if there was a significant difference between adherence and non-adherence. The study found a significant proportion (93.4%) of non-adherence to hypertension guidelines among consulting nurses at selected PHC facilities.