Knowledge and Attitude of Nurses Towards Palliative Care in Government Health Hospitals of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2016
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Date
2016-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Introduction: To provide quality palliative care, nurses must have good knowledge and attitude
about palliative care. Different Studies have documented that nurses and other health care
professionals are inadequately prepared to care for patients in palliative care. In the case of
nurses several reasons have been identified including inadequacies in nursing education and lack
of in-service training related to palliative care.
Objective: To assess knowledge and attitude towards palliative care among nurses working in
Addis Ababa government hospitals, Ethiopia, 2016.
Methods: An institution based cross-sectional study was conducted among 392 nurses in four
randomly selected government hospitals in Addis Ababa. To select the study participants, the
total sample size was allocated proportionally based on the number of nurses from each selected
hospitals. Again proportional allocation was done for each work area in each selected hospitals.
Finally from each work areas, nurses were selected by using a systematic random sampling
method to attain the final individuals. The knowledge and attitude of nurses towards palliative
care was measured using questionnaires which are adopted and modified from the Palliative Care
Quiz for Nursing and Frommelt Attitude toward Care of the Dying scale respectively. Epidata
and SPSS version 23 software were applied for data entry and analysis respectively.
Results: the response rate was 392 (92.02%) of total 426 participants. Study results have shown
that only 104(26.5%) of the respondents had good knowledge and 331(84.4%) had favorable
attitude towards palliative care. Level of Education, working department, years of working
experiences in nursing, experience in caring chronically ill patient and in-service training of
palliative care had significant association with the knowledge of nurses. Level of education,
experience in caring chronically ill patient and in-service training were found to be statistically
significant with the attitude of nurses towards palliative care.
Conclusion and recommendations: The nurses had poor knowledge but their attitude towards
palliative care was favorable. Attention should be given towards palliative care by the health
policy and needs to be incorporated in the national curriculum of nurse education.
Keywords: knowledge, attitude, palliative care, nurses, Addis Ababa, government hospitals.
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Keywords
Knowledge, Attitude, Palliative care, Nurses