Development of a Health Promotion Nursing Intervention for Post-traumatic Stress Women Based on Swanson's Theory of Caring

Development of a Health Promotion Nursing Intervention for Post-traumatic Stress Women Based on Swanson's Theory of Caring

Objectives: We aimed to (1) develop a caring program for health promotion among women who experienced trauma and (2) evaluate its effect on post-traumatic stress, depression, health-promoting behaviors, and self-esteem.

Methods: We conducted a quasi-experimental study using a group pre-test/post-test design. Data were collected from 14 women recruited from a self-sufficiency support center for sexually exploited women who experienced trauma, during December 2019-May 2020. Participants were assessed at pre-test, post-test, and at a one-month follow-up. We analyzed changes in outcome variables over time using repeated-measures analysis of variance and paired t-tests.

Inclusion Criteria:

1. women aged over 18 years who had experienced a traumatic event, and
2. a PTS score of 64 or lower on the PTSD checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) developed by Weathers et al. (1993), revised by Weathers et al. (2013), and translated into Korean by Kim et al. (2017).

Exclusion Criteria:

1. presence of psychiatric conditions with hallucinations and delusions, and
2. diagnosis of an intellectual disability that would make understanding the intervention procedure difficult. Although a standard cut-off was not present in the PCL-5, women who exceeded 80% (64 points) of the total score were excluded to rule out high-risk women with severe trauma.