Background: Diabetic foot problems are one of the most important complications of diabetes mellitus
which causing a worldwide high cost morbidity which could be due to poor self-practices.
Objectives: To assess the preventive food care practices among diabetic patients and to find out any
significant association of these practices with selected socio-demographical and diabetic related
characteristics.
Patients and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in Baquba city from the
period of 20th Septembers, 2016 up to 20th March, 2017, by selecting a sample of (120) patients by
using a structured questionnaire, the questionnaire composed of three parts, the first part contains
information related to patients’ demographic characteristics, the second part contains some
information related to diabetic characteristics and the third part of the questionnaire consists of
different questions about preventive foot care practices which consist of 14 positive items. Each one
of these items must be answered either with (Always, Never or Sometimes). A three levels Likert
scale was used to measure the variables. Finally, the data analyzed using SPSS (Ver.18) and the Chisquare
was used to find out any association between studied data and preventive foot care practices. P
≤ 0.05 was considered significant in the present study.
Results: Out of 120 diabetic patients, (40%) of them were over 60 years, (52.5%) were male patients,
about one third (32.5%) were illiterate, most of them (40.8%) had moderate monthly income, majority
of them (66.7%) were living in urban areas. Also the current study showed that the patient responses
to preventive foot care practices were satisfactory at all studied items, except at the these items
“drying my feet after washing, regular use of lotion or oil to moisturizing foot, taking care when
clipping my toenail and visiting doctor after foot injury , their responses assessment were
unsatisfactory. It was found that (62.5%) of the studied patients had an acceptable and good foot care
practices.
Conclusions: It concluded from this study that most of the diabetic patients had an acceptable and
good foot care practices, and didn’t indicate a significant association between the patients’ age,
gender, residency, duration of disease and previous history of foot ulcer with an overall assessment of
preventive foot care practices and there was only a significant association with overall assessment of
the studied preventive diabetic foot care practices with patients’ educational level and monthly
income.