Knowledge, attitudes and practices of intensive care unit nurses towards nutritional support in critically ill patients in Sina, Shohada and Imam Reza hospitals

Abstract

In recent years, there has been concern about the lack of nutritional awareness among nurses. Nutrition training in the medical curriculum is contradictory and inadequate. Also, nutrition and awareness training courses among healthcare professionals are weak. Given that nurses are the most reliable source of nutritional information for patients and little research has been done so far on nurses' information about their role in nutritional care and understanding the principles and components of nutrition and their experiences and due to the lack of study in this field in Iran, the present study is designed to assess the current level of awareness, attitude and performance of nurses in intensive care units on the principles of nutrition in hospitalized patients in intensive care. Materials and Methods: To collect the data, a four-part questionnaire including the first part of demographic information, the second part of closed and open questions related to awareness, the third part of closed and open questions related to attitude, the fourth part of closed and open questions related to performance were used. Cross-sectional-descriptive study from February 2017 to February 2018 by designing a questionnaire and distributing it among all nurses working in the ICU departments and re-collecting the questionnaires and separating the questionnaires that met the criteria for leaving the study and reviewing the answers provided and analyzed. And analysis of the results was performed. Results: In this study, 110 nurses were studied. Average age of nurses examined 31.20 ± 6.11 is the rate of education in the majority of nurses studied with a bachelor's degree. Also, most nurses were married. The female was almost twice as likely as the male. The average work experience at the ICU was reported to be about 6 years. The present study showed that nurses surveyed have high awareness, moderate performance and positive attitude about nutritional support in patients admitted to the intensive care unit in Imam Reza, Sina and Shohada hospitals in Tabriz. In this study, nurses' awareness of age and level of education had a significant relationship. Nurses' attitudes towards age and education had a significant relationship and nurses' performance with age, work rate in ICU and education had a significant relationship.