Educational needs of emergency nurses to deal with biological factors in hospitals of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences 2011

ABSTRACT: Bioterrorism refers to intentional using of biological factors against human, animals and plants with the aim of their inability or annihilation. Training of preparedness skills against bioterrorism attacks is essential in all health care and treatment situations, such as nursing. The present research evaluates the educational needs and the preparedness amount of nurses against bioterrorism attacks so that by specifying the educational needs, the particular scientific planning would be done.This is a descriptive cross sectional study and the research community is all the nurses working in the emergency wards of educational hospitals of Tabriz. The collection tool is a two-fold questionnaire: 1- personnel demographic information, 2- educational need according to the preparedness criteria against biological attacks including 21 questions in four subsets. In this tool, the Likert scale has been used and then analyzed after distribution of questionnaire and data by using SPSS-17 software.Of 120 distributed questionnaires, 108 were analyzed statistically and the results demonstrated that most of the nurses participated in the present study were female (3/71%).While investigating the education of the nurses in the emergency ward, it revealed that 8/88% participants, that means most of them, had a bachelor’s degree and %53.7 had a less-than-ten-years experience of working in the emergency ward (table1).About education specifically for critical situations, 1/53% participants had not been trained by any organization. The mean score for perceived knowledge of all the questions was (97/0±40/2). The highest mean score and standard deviation given to subsets was in the giving report and having access to vital resources ( (89/0±37/2and the least were for identifying the biological factors (9/0±11/2). And the mean score of four subsets represent that in all of them the scores were lower than average. The obtained results of this research and mean score for each subset show that the emergency nurses do not have the required preparedness to appropriate responding in biological attacks. Also, holding training courses during service is recommended for nurses who work in all the hospitals and health care centers of country in the field of being familiar with biological factors and the way of opposing and treatment of patients and including issues in this field in the curriculum of nursing students from the approaches of increasing knowledge and skill level of nurses in preparedness and opposing against biological factors seems as an essential matter.