Cargando…

Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study

INTRODUCTION: Delirium is the most common emergency for older hospitalized patients that demands urgent treatment, otherwise it can lead to more severe health conditions. Nurses play a crucial part in diagnosing delirium and their competencies facilitate the appropriate treatment and management of t...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Papaioannou, Maria, Papastavrou, Evridiki, Kouta, Christiana, Tsangari, Haritini, Merkouris, Anastasios
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832247/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36631856
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12912-022-01158-9
_version_ 1784868018134712320
author Papaioannou, Maria
Papastavrou, Evridiki
Kouta, Christiana
Tsangari, Haritini
Merkouris, Anastasios
author_facet Papaioannou, Maria
Papastavrou, Evridiki
Kouta, Christiana
Tsangari, Haritini
Merkouris, Anastasios
author_sort Papaioannou, Maria
collection PubMed
description INTRODUCTION: Delirium is the most common emergency for older hospitalized patients that demands urgent treatment, otherwise it can lead to more severe health conditions. Nurses play a crucial part in diagnosing delirium and their competencies facilitate the appropriate treatment and management of the condition. AIM: This study aims to enhance the understanding of delirium care by exploring both knowledge and attitudes of nurses toward patients in acute care hospital wards and the possible association between these two variables. METHOD: The Nurses Knowledge of Delirium Questionnaire (NKD) and the Attitude Tool of Delirium (ATOD) that were created for the said inquiry, were disseminated to 835 nurses in the four largest Public Hospitals of the Republic. These tools focused particularly on departments with increased frequency of delirium (response rate = 67%). RESULTS: Overall nurses have limited knowledge of acute confusion/delirium. The average of correct answers was 42.2%. Only 38% of the participants reported a correct definition of delirium, 41.6 correctly reported the tools to identify delirium and 42.5 answered correctly on the factors leading to delirium development. The results of the attitudes’ questionnaire confirmed that attitudes towards patients with delirium may not be supportive enough. A correlation between the level of nurses’ knowledge and their attitude was also found. The main factors influencing the level of knowledge and attitudes were gender, education, and workplace. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study are useful for the international audience since they can be used to develop and modify educational programmes in order to rectify the knowledge deficits and uninformed attitudes towards patients with delirium. The development of a valid and reliable instrument for the evaluation of attitudes will help to further assess nurses’ attitudes. Furthermore, the results are even more important and useful on a national level since there is no prior data on the subject area, making this study the first of its kind.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-9832247
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2023
publisher BioMed Central
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-98322472023-01-11 Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study Papaioannou, Maria Papastavrou, Evridiki Kouta, Christiana Tsangari, Haritini Merkouris, Anastasios BMC Nurs Research INTRODUCTION: Delirium is the most common emergency for older hospitalized patients that demands urgent treatment, otherwise it can lead to more severe health conditions. Nurses play a crucial part in diagnosing delirium and their competencies facilitate the appropriate treatment and management of the condition. AIM: This study aims to enhance the understanding of delirium care by exploring both knowledge and attitudes of nurses toward patients in acute care hospital wards and the possible association between these two variables. METHOD: The Nurses Knowledge of Delirium Questionnaire (NKD) and the Attitude Tool of Delirium (ATOD) that were created for the said inquiry, were disseminated to 835 nurses in the four largest Public Hospitals of the Republic. These tools focused particularly on departments with increased frequency of delirium (response rate = 67%). RESULTS: Overall nurses have limited knowledge of acute confusion/delirium. The average of correct answers was 42.2%. Only 38% of the participants reported a correct definition of delirium, 41.6 correctly reported the tools to identify delirium and 42.5 answered correctly on the factors leading to delirium development. The results of the attitudes’ questionnaire confirmed that attitudes towards patients with delirium may not be supportive enough. A correlation between the level of nurses’ knowledge and their attitude was also found. The main factors influencing the level of knowledge and attitudes were gender, education, and workplace. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study are useful for the international audience since they can be used to develop and modify educational programmes in order to rectify the knowledge deficits and uninformed attitudes towards patients with delirium. The development of a valid and reliable instrument for the evaluation of attitudes will help to further assess nurses’ attitudes. Furthermore, the results are even more important and useful on a national level since there is no prior data on the subject area, making this study the first of its kind. BioMed Central 2023-01-11 /pmc/articles/PMC9832247/ /pubmed/36631856 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12912-022-01158-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Papaioannou, Maria
Papastavrou, Evridiki
Kouta, Christiana
Tsangari, Haritini
Merkouris, Anastasios
Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
title Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
title_full Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
title_fullStr Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
title_full_unstemmed Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
title_short Investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
title_sort investigating nurses’ knowledge and attitudes about delirium in older persons: a cross-sectional study
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9832247/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36631856
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12912-022-01158-9
work_keys_str_mv AT papaioannoumaria investigatingnursesknowledgeandattitudesaboutdeliriuminolderpersonsacrosssectionalstudy
AT papastavrouevridiki investigatingnursesknowledgeandattitudesaboutdeliriuminolderpersonsacrosssectionalstudy
AT koutachristiana investigatingnursesknowledgeandattitudesaboutdeliriuminolderpersonsacrosssectionalstudy
AT tsangariharitini investigatingnursesknowledgeandattitudesaboutdeliriuminolderpersonsacrosssectionalstudy
AT merkourisanastasios investigatingnursesknowledgeandattitudesaboutdeliriuminolderpersonsacrosssectionalstudy