1- Nursing (MSN), School of Nursing and Midwifery, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran.
2- Instructor, Department of Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran. , f.hasavari@gmail.com
3- Instructor, Department of Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran.
4- Associate Professor, Social Determinants of Health Research Center (SDHRC), Biostatistics, Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Rasht, Iran.
Abstract: (3304 Views)
Introduction: Palliative care is the science of promoting the patient’s quality of life. It can improve the quality of life of a patient, which is effective not only in patient’s late-life but also useful in dealing with a chronic illness over many years. In this regard, nurses, as the largest providers of health care services, play an important role in palliative care.
Objective: This study aimed to investigate the palliative care knowledge of nurses and its contributing factors.
Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 280 nurses working in different departments of hospitals affiliated to Guilan University of Medical Sciences (GUMS). They were recruited using the stratified random sampling technique. Their data were collected by a demographic form and the Palliative Care Quiz for Nursing (PCQN) instrument. The collected data were analyzed by Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests.
Results: The Mean±SD score of palliative care knowledge of study nurses was reported as 7.86±2.16 indicating their imperfect knowledge. Among studied factors, only the personal study about palliative care had a significant association with the nurses’ knowledge (P=0.038).
Conclusion: Nurses had poor knowledge of palliative care and its subscales that is one of the main obstacles in providing optimal palliative care. So, increasing their quality of palliative care services by improving their knowledge through in-service education and on the job retraining could promote the quality of palliative care services for the patients.
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Highlights
● Palliative care promotes quality of life for patients and their families in facing life-threatening diseases.
● Nurses spend a lot of time caring for critically-ill patients, so they are expected to have sufficient knowledge to provide the best care for these patients.
● Palliative care provision can save a lot of cost for both the patient and the health care system.
● This study results highlight extra attention to presenting nursing education programs on palliative care.
Plain Language Summary
Palliative care is the science of promoting the quality of life of a patient. It is not only effective in the patient’s late-life but also useful in dealing with a chronic illness over many years. In this regard, nurses as the largest providers of health care services play an essential role in palliative care. Nowadays, the care of patients with chronic diseases takes a significant part of the health problems, so the provision of palliative care services to patients with chronic diseases and the role of nurses in this regard, as well as the impact of their knowledge on the quality of these services, is essential. In this study, we assessed the knowledge of 280 nurses about palliative care was evaluated by the Palliative Care Quiz for Nursing instrument. They were working in the hospitals affiliated to Guilan University of Medical Sciences in 2016. The results revealed their poor knowledge of palliative care. Among the studied factors, only the personal study about palliative care had a significant association with their knowledge. According to the results, we suggest that the nurses’ understanding of the quality of palliative care services be increased by holding in-service education and on the job retraining. These measures should promote palliative care services.
Article Type :
Research |
Subject:
General Received: 2019/08/2 | Accepted: 2019/09/16 | Published: 2019/10/1