Development of a Tool for the Assessment of Nurses' Attitudes Toward Delirium

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 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.

Knowledge, attitudes and practices of ICU nurses regarding subsyndromal delirium among 20 hospitals in China: a descriptive cross-sectional survey

OBJECTIVES

This study sought to investigate nurses' knowledge, attitudes and practices, and analyse the influencing factors for subsyndromal delirium (SSD).

DESIGN

A descriptive cross-sectional survey.

SETTING

E-questionnaires were distributed to intensive care unit (ICU) nurses from 20 tertiary-grade, A-class hospitals in Henan Province, China.

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 740 ICU nurses participated in the questionnaire survey.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Each dimension score is converted to a percentage scale. A score of ≤60% on each dimension of the questionnaire was considered a negative score, <80% was considered a intermediate score and ≥80% was considered an excellent score.

RESULTS

A total of 733 questionnaires were included in the study. More than half of the nurses were at the intermediate level, and a few nurses were at the excellent level. Nurses self-assessed their level of knowledge was intermediate. In the attitudes dimension, nurses' attitudes were negative. The results of the practical dimension showed that most nurses could carry out the clinical practice. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that educational level and received SSD training were influencing factors.

CONCLUSIONS

ICU nursing staff overestimated their knowledge of SSD and showed a negative attitude towards it. Various forms of education and training are necessary.