Huei-Fan YangWen-Wei ChangYing-Hsiang ChouJing-Yang HuangYa-Fang KePei-Fang TsaiHsiu-Man ChanHsueh-Ya TsaiHsien-Chun TsengShih-Tsung ChangYueh-Chun Lee2026-02-032026-02-032023-07-1110.1186/s13014-023-02312-6https://scholars.csmu.edu.tw/handle/123456789/4789<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:sec> <jats:title>Background</jats:title> <jats:p>Ninety percent of patients receiving radiation therapy experience side effects. Busy schedules and intensive health education programs may lead to incomplete education content delivery and inaccurate patient self-care implementation. This study investigated whether multimedia health education improves the accuracy of patient self-care implementation compared with paper-based education.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Methods</jats:title> <jats:p>From March 11, 2020 to February 28, 2021, 110 patients were randomly divided into experimental and control groups, each comprising 55 participants. Paper-based materials were used along with multimedia materials. Radiology self-care awareness questionnaires were administered to both groups before the first treatment and on day 10. The differences in radiology self-care awareness between the two groups was analyzed with inferential statistics, independent t tests, categorical data, and Pearson’s chi-squared test. Differences between the two groups were considered significant at a <jats:italic>p</jats:italic> value of &lt; 0.05.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Results</jats:title> <jats:p>The treatment accuracy rate improved from 10.9 to 79.1% in the control group and from 24.8 to 98.5% in the experimental group, indicating an improvement in both groups. The difference was significant. These results indicate that the intervention could improve the effectiveness of self-care.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title> <jats:p>Participants who used pretreatment multimedia health education exhibited a higher rate of having a correct understanding of treatment self-care than did the control group. These findings can inform the development of a patient-centered cancer treatment knowledge base for improved quality of care.</jats:p> </jats:sec>[SDGs]SDG3journal-article