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Caring Today

The Survey of Knowledge, and Attitude of Nurses in Teaching Hospitals and Nursing students towards Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Lorestan University of Medical Sciences

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 Nursing PhD student in Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Instructor of Faculty of Lorestan Nursing and Midwifery, Khorramabad, Iran.
2 Nursing PhD student in Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
3 Nursing PhD student in Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences, Instructor of Facultyof Lorestan Nursing and Midwifery, Khorramabad, Iran.
Abstract
Background & Aim:Nurses and nursing students as one of the important members of the health care team are obliged to be knowledgeable about Complementary and Alternative Therapies and to provide accurate and needed information for patients and other health care professionals. This study was conducted to determine the nurses’ and nursing student’ knowledge, Attitude and Willingness to Complementary and Alternative Therapies.
 
Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study 162 nurses and 115 nursing students were selected with convenience sampling. The instrument of Data collection was knowledge questionnaire of different methods of Complementary and Alternative Therapies that requested nurses to express their knowledge about every one of the methods as no knowledge, low, moderate and high knowledge. Also to assess nurses attitude to Complementary and Alternative Therapies, a 12 items questionnaire completed by subjects via likert scales from complete agreement to complete disagreement. Collected data was analyzed with descriptive statistics.
 
Results: The highest information among students was expressed about regimen therapy (60.9%), massage (50.4%), vitamins (48.7 %) and herbal therapy (42.6%) and among nurses it was reported that regimen therapy (61.1%), vitamins (53.1 %) , massage (45.7%), herbal therapy (41.3%) and spiritual healing (35.8 %). Both groups reported the lowest knowledge about aromatherapy, homeopathy, chiropractic, biofeedback and acupressure. The mean and standard deviation of attitude of nursing students and nurses to complementary therapy were 62.35 ± 9.64 and 60.88 ± 6.57 respectively. 
 
Conclusion: The knowledge of nurses of the different complementary therapies isn’t sufficient   to respond to increasing use of these methods in societies. But the majority of them have good and positive attitude to it and may put them to use without knowledge of the benefits and risks of these methods. Therefore it is best if subjects related to Traditional and Complementary Therapy be added to the courses of Nursing students and olso in the educational programs for in service nurses, in the constant training of nurses, and in the post graduate courses for nurses.
Keywords

Volume 7, 24-25
The journal has been published as Aflaak
March 2011
Pages 47-54