Knowledge and Practice of Staff Nurses on Palliative Care

To provide quality care at the end of life or for chronically ill patients, nurses must have good knowledge, attitude and practice about palliative care. Palliative care concept is new in Assam and very little is known about the type of services offered and the readiness of nurses to provide palliative care. A descriptive study was conducted to assess the knowledge and practice of staff nurses on palliative care in selected hospitals of Guwahati city, Assam. A self-administered structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 100 staff nurses. The study revealed that maximum 79% have inadequate knowledge, 21% have moderately adequate knowledge and no one has adequate knowledge on palliative care. According to the levels of practice maximum 48% practice adequately where as 43% practice moderately adequate and only 9% practice inadequately. The correlation (r=0.30) indicates that there is a positive correlation between knowledge and practice scores of palliative care by the staff nurses. Further analysis revealed that there is positive correlation between knowledge and practice with all the age group, professional qualification, The result also reveals that the nurses working in North-East Cancer Hospital and Research Institute and Dr. B. Barooah cancer hospital practices more according to their knowledge because of their exposure to patients who needs palliative care than the nurses working in Gauhati Medical College Hospital. It was also observed that there is negative correlation between knowledge and practice of nurses with lowest and highest years of experience selected for this study.