Abstract
Objectives:
The study aims to find out the prevalence and factors associated with the difficulty faced by glaucoma patients during the Humphrey visual field (HVF) test.
Material and Methods:
A hospital-based descriptive cross-sectional study design was used. A total of 233 glaucoma patients, who had performed the HVF test, were recruited with a convenience sampling technique. Face-to-face interviews with pre-tested and modified semi-structured questionnaires were used for data collection. The chi-square test was used to analyze the associations between difficulty and factors influencing difficulties.
Results:
Out of 233 participants, 194(83.3%) had faced difficulties during the assessment. The majority of the participants were challenged due to watering 88 (37.8%), followed by difficulty focusing constantly on the target 73 (31.3%), and confusion 59 (25.3%). The study found that there was a significant association between difficulty faced with test completed (
n
= 195) and uncompleted (
n
= 38), i.e. 156(80%) and 38(100%) respectively (
p
= 0.003). There were no significant associations found between difficulties and patient-related factors i.e. Best Corrected Visual Acuity (
p
=0.195), gender (
p
= 0.154), age (
p
= 0.286), and educational status (
p
= 0.286) as well as technician-related factors (
p
= 0.486). However, there were significant differences seen due to environmental factors, i.e. noise (
p
=0.001).
Conclusion:
The majority of participants struggled during the procedure. Background noise was the major environmental factor influencing difficulties during the HVF assessment.