Nurses' Knowledge about and Attitudes toward AIDS and Patients with AIDS

Son, Jung Tae

Abstract

With the increasing incidence of AIDS, it is probably inevitable that nurses working in hospital and community settings will come in contact with patients with AIDS. Nurses, more than any other health care profession, are on the front line of AIDS patient care. The purposes of this descriptive study were to gather information about registered nurses'knowledge and attitude regarding AIDS, and to provide a basis for the development of continuining education programs for the nurse. Data was gathered in 1988 using self-administered questionnaires given to a convinience sample of two hundred seventy registered nurses from two university hospitals, school nurses and postgraduate students of nursing. Data was analyzed with SAS. The results were as follows. Above 90% of the nurse knew well about definition of AIDS and routes of transmission but nurses relatively lacked knowledge about transmission of HIV in breast milk(69.3%). Less than half knew that drug abuser(44.1%) and sexual partner with IV drug abuser(39.6%) are at high risk for contracting AIDS. Above 70% of the nurse showed reluctance to provide care for surgery, delivery of child birth and hemodialysis of patients with AIDS. The results showed that, given a choice, 41.7% of the nurse would refuse to care for AIDS patients and 48.3% claimed that they should have a right refuse to care for AIDS patients. Reluctance of nursing patient with AIDS appeared to be principally associated with general fear of becoming infected with HIV. 41.8% exhibited a sympathetic attitude toward individual AIDS patient. The study findings suggest that it is necessary to examine the correlations between knowledge and attitude and to develop continuing education programs that alleviate the fear of contagion of the nurse.