ABSTRACT:
The main objective of this study was to find out the knowledge, awareness and practice among diabetic retinopathy (DR) patients at a tertiary care hospital. Diabetic retinopathy is the micro vascular complication of Diabetes Mellitus (DM) that damages the tiny blood vessels of retina that can lead to blindness. DR usually occurs due to poor management of DM and lack of knowledge on the complications of diabetes mellitus. Diabetic retinopathy patients were randomly selected and requested to fill the pretested questionnaire before and after counselling regarding diabetic mellitus and retinopathy complications. All statistical analyses were done using graph pad prism and Microsoft excel. Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) scores were found to be 81.02 % (knowledge), 76.19% (awareness) and 70.13% (practice) respectively after counselling. A paired t test was done to analyze the difference in KAP scores before and after counselling which showed a significant difference (p<0.0001) confirming the importance of improvement in KAP. These results suggest that awareness to DR is very important and we need to propagate aggressive and comprehensive awareness models to educate rural populations on DM and its retinopathy complications.