ABSTRACT:
A Comparative study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of Foleys catheter suctioning versus conventional catheter suctioning on mucosal injury and level of pain among patients with tracheostomy. A quantitative reseach approach with quasi experimental post test only design was used. Through non probability convenience sampling technique 60 patients were selected, among them 30 patients from Sri Gokulam Hospital assigned as experimental group I and 30 patients from SKS Hospital assigned as experimental group II. The mucosal injury and level of pain was assessed followed by suctioning procedure at the end of the day for 3 days. The collected data finding reveals that 22(73.3%) samples of experimental group I and 20(66.7%) samples of experimental group II were suctioned more than 5 times with foleys and conventional suction catheters .In experimental group I and II 29(96.7%) were in plastic tracheostomy tube. On day one 8(26.6%) patients from experimental group I had severe pain and 11(36.6%) patients from experimental group II had worst possible pain. Whereas in day three 2(6.6%) from experimental group I had severe pain and 11(36.6%) from experimental group II had worst possible pain. There was no evidence of mucosal injury in both the groups. The posttest mean and SD score for experimental group I and II was 1.73±0.71, 3.20±0.58 respectively. The obtained “t”value was 8.58 which were significant at p= 0.05 level. Hence H1 was retained only for level of pain. There was significant association (X²=9.49) found between conventional suction catheter with type of tracheostomy tube in experimental group II at p= 0.05 level. Hence H¬2 was retained only for this variable. The study concludes that foleys catheter suctioning was effective than conventional suction catheter in reducing the level of pain among patients with tracheostomy and there was no significant changes in the mucosal injury irrespective of foleys catheter and conventional catheter suctioning.