Association of socio demographic factors and health education on awareness of palliative care among student nurses in the Eastern Province

Abstract

Background: According to the definition of Palliative care it is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.

Palliative care is necessarily multidisciplinary. It cannot be expect from one profession or individual to have the skills to make the necessary assessment, institute the necessary interventions, and provide ongoing monitoring. So the nursing profession as well as the doctors has a major role in providing palliative care.

Objective: The study was aimed to assess the associations between socio-demographic factors and awareness of palliative care and between receipt of health education and awareness of palliative care among student Nurses in the Eastern Province.

Methodology: This descriptive, cross sectional study was carried out for a period of one year, among Nursing Students of Eastern Province.

Result: Palliative care is a recently introduced specialty. In Sri Lanka, many attempts are made to improve the standard of palliative care and it’s slowly evolving. The knowledge about palliative care is lacking among medical professionals and general public. The current study was conducted with the aim of assessing the awareness on palliative care among the 141 of second, third and fourth year nursing students of Eastern province. Among the participant majority were female (90.8%), Sinhala (65.2%) and majority of the participant were from nuclear family (85.1%) type. A self-administered questionnaire consisting of 48 questions was used to assess the awareness level of palliative care of the participants. Among the participants 56% identified palliative care as geriatric medicine. Nearly 72.3% of the participants correctly responded the questions related to pain medicine and 55.3% had correctly identified dying is a normal active process.16.3% of the participants stated that they have visited to palliative care organization.

Conclusion:

Comparing the socio demographic factors of the participants, there is a significant association between gender, family history of palliative care, type of family and health related occupation. Positive statistical significant on palliative care’s awareness level was observed among the third year and fourth year students, the students who visited any palliative care organization, and the students who have finished the clinical appointments such as medicine, surgery, psychiatrics obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics.