Assessing primary health care nurses' knowledge toward immunizations: A quantitative study.

Abstract

Background: The current nursing workforce needs to be skilled, confident, and competent to address the rapid change in Primary Health Care services, to align with the National Vision of Qatar. This is emphasized in the Primary Health Care Strategy 2018-2023. This strategy outlines the need of having a skilled nursing workforce to administer and educate the public about the importance of immunizations. Primary Health Care nurses emanate from several nationalities and hence possess various level of knowledge and background related to immunization administration.Design and methods: To assess Primary Health Care nurses’ knowledge before and after the delivered immunization education program in Qatar. The study was part of a Sequential mixed method research study that aimed to assess the Primary Health Care nurses’ knowledge, attitude, and practice of nurses before and after the conducted training program. A self-administered survey, specifically developed for the research project was loaded in Qualtrics and sent to participants of the immunization education program before and after training. Participants were trained in two cohorts from October to December, 2018 in Qatar. For the purposes of this paper, data about the immunization knowledge was statistically analyzed using the SPSS Software version 25 and Microsoft Excel.Results: Specific areas were identified as knowledge gaps among the participants of the two cohorts. Moreover, the developed education program showed overall improvement in the participants’ knowledge.Conclusions: The study results have demonstrated that the delivered immunization education program significantly increases the participants’ knowledge about immunization in certain areas of the primary healthcare clinics they work, including vaccine safety, efficiency, and contraindications in the delivery of vaccines to the public.Significance for public healthQatar is a multinational country containing expatriates from all over the world from either developing or developed nations that are transient in their length of stay. As a result, having misconceptions related to vaccine administration can be varied, these may include such things as vaccine schedules, varying beliefs and myths related to vaccine administration as well as knowledge about each of the vaccines. For this reason, Primary Health Care nurses need to be equipped with the immunization related knowledge and skill to deliver the required education that encourages vaccine uptake to mitigate the transmission of vaccine preventable diseases.