A Descriptive Cross-Sectional Survey on Public Attitude Towards Nursing Profession in India

Abstract

Introduction: There has been a tremendous growth in the nursing profession over the past 100 years and the attitude of the society towards it has transformed significantly. The general public attitude can be viewed as positive or negative. Though, in India, this field is not receiving its required respect, which can be determined by various factors like its low reputation in the society, no specific job description, no syllabus or subjects for different administrative fractions in nursing, no fruition of higher degrees for influential post, the governance of doctors, nor the sovereignty to the field, unattractive salary packages for nurses and so on. This study was aimed to assess the attitude of general public towards nursing profession. Methodology: A descriptive cross sectional survey on 391 samples collected all over India through snow ball sampling technique. The tool contains 10 demographic variables and the 5 point Likert scale to assess the attitude of general public. Likert scale contains 10 items with maximum score of 50. The internal consistency of the tool was 0.731 and acceptable range was 0.65 to 0.75. The data was collected by face to face contact and through mobile app (watts app and survey monkey app). The data was collected from Jan to Feb 2019. The recorded responses were coded in excel sheet and computed in SPSS-16. Result: It showed that the general public attitude was favorable towards nursing profession (Mean =38.5 ±4.844). Geographical area and member in the family is a nurse has significant association with level of attitude towards nursing profession. Conclusion: In spite of favorable attitude, still public have undesirable attitude in certain point towards this profession. People are still uncertain about gender orientation of nursing profession, duty schedule and marital life of nurses. People still believes that nursing is a female oriented profession and only female can practice nursing, and shift duty in nursing puts female nurses at risk, as well as doing nursing duty will affect marriage life. So general public need more awareness about nature, benefit, value and scope of nursing profession in order to have transparent, pure and coherent attitude towards nursing profession.