Parents of children with gastrostomy have problems with the selection and preparation of
nutritional products and catheter care during home care. Parents express that they want
to receive practical training in the process of home care of the child with gastrostomy,
they want to communicate more with the team and they need continuous monitoring to solve
the problems encountered effectively. In this context, it is aimed to establish an
appropriate training programme for the care of children with gastrostomy, to provide
counselling and follow-up.

Digital health technologies are divided into different sub-branches. Mobile health
applications constitute one of these structures. Mobile health applications are used in
elective surgical interventions in pediatric surgery (tonsillectomy, hernia repair,
circumcision, etc.) and in the home care process after organ transplantation. In
pediatric surgery, many mobile health applications have been developed to support pain
management, symptom monitoring, medication adherence, support care processes,
postoperative follow-up and self-management processes. In mobile health applications, no
mobile application has been found for the use of parents of children with gastrostomy. In
Turkey, there is no known nursing study for the use of parents of children with
gastrostomy. The aim of this study is to develop a mobile application for the care of
children with gastrostomy and to determine the effect of the application on gastrostomy
complications, care burden of parents, self-efficacy and anxiety level.

This research was planned in two stages as follows:

In the first stage, it was aimed to develop a mobile application supported education
programme (G-MUEP) for the care of children with gastrostomy.

In the second stage, it was aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of G-MUEP.

For this purpose, the hypotheses of the research are as follows:

Parents using G-MUEP are more effective than the parents in the control group; Hypothesis
1 (H1): care burden is less. Hypothesis 2 (H1): their self-efficacy is higher. Hypothesis
3 (H1): anxiety levels are lower. Compared to the children in the control group, the
children of the parents using G-MUEP; Hypothesis 1 (H1): gastrostomy-related complication
findings are less.