Knowledge, attitude toward palliative care and associated factors among clinical nurses in Vietnam.

Abstract

137 Background: Nurses who offer palliative care must be knowledgeable about several aspects of caring for advanced cancer patient. The concept of palliative care is not widely discussed in Vietnam, and there needs to be more data regarding the knowledge and attitude of the nurses. This study’s objectives were to (1) Describe the knowledge and attitudes about palliative care of nurses and (2) Identify related factors with knowledge and attitudes about palliative care among those nurses. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 118 nurses working in a University Hospital. The Palliative Care Quiz for Nursing (PCQN) and The Frommelt Attitude Towards Care of the Dying Scale (FATCOD) were used to measure the participants' knowledge and attitude toward Palliative care. The 34-item of PCQN used a ‘true/ false/don’t know’ format with possible scores ranging from 0 to 34. The FATCOD consists of 30 items, Positive items were scored from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Possible scores ranged from 30 to 150. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21 was used to analyze the data. The level of significance for all analyses was set at less than 0.05. Results: There were 118 nurses completed the questionnaire. Most participants were female (69.5%) and younger than 25 years (84.7%). Nearly two-thirds of nurses had graduate and postgraduate degrees (67.8%) and 62% of nurses had more than five years of working experience. 24% of nurses have received palliative care training, and 96% of nurses wanted to learn palliative care, 85% of nurses reported that palliative care is necessary for their work. Most of them (78%) had moderate palliative care knowledge; only 31% of the nurses had a positive attitude toward palliative care. A significant relationship was found between working experience and a positive attitude toward palliative care (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Nurses’ knowledge and attitude about palliative care were not high. Clinical nurses need more education to develop their palliative care knowledge and skills. Palliative care should be added to the curriculum for undergraduate students.