title: Cues to action: pelvic floor muscle exercise compliance in women with stress urinary incontinence.
abstract: Pelvic floor muscle exercises are recommended as an initial treatment to women with stress urinary incontinence. This treatment is often unsuccessful because of patient noncompliance. A post-test, experimental control group design was used to examine Pender's (1992) concept of an external cue to action, an audiocassette tape, to enhance patient compliance to pelvic floor exercises. Eighty-six women with urodynamically evaluated stress urinary incontinence participated through a Pelvic Floor Exercise Unit at a large teaching hospital. Patients received biofeedback training and written information to reinforce pelvic floor muscle exercises during a 45-min appointment with a nurse. Patients were instructed to perform the exercises for 10 min twice daily. Forty-three women randomly assigned to an experimental group received an audiocassette tape. Four to 6 weeks later all patients completed a researcher-developed questionnaire that was validity and reliability tested assessing pelvic floor exercise compliance. The 43 patients (100%) who received the audiocassette tape reported compliance with "routine" exercises. Twenty-two of 34 patients (65%) who did not receive the tape were compliant (P = 0.0003). Thirty-four of 41 patients (83%) who received the tape reported exercise compliance twice a day, while 4 of 34 patients (12%) in the control group were similarly compliant (P = 0.0000). The findings suggest adding an audiocassette tape to a pelvic floor exercise program enhances patient compliance for incontinent women compared to verbal and written instruction combined with biofeedback.
authors.affiliation: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Urodynamic and Continence Center, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: M L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Gallo
authors.forename: D R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Staskin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003463:Cues; D005081:Exercise Therapy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009132:Muscles / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010349:Patient Compliance; D010388:Pelvis; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013637:Tape Recording; D014550:Urinary Incontinence, Stress / Q000628:therapy*