Teachers' awareness about epilepsy in children at Al Basra primary schools

الملخص EN

Background: With a global prevalence of 5-10 per 1000 persons, epilepsy is one of the most prevalent nerve disorders in children.

Significantly, roughly 3% of children diagnosed with epilepsy at some point in their lives.

Objectives: Assess awareness of Primary school teachers toward epilepsy in children, and identify the relationship between teacher awareness with specific demographic data.

Methods: The study is descriptive-analytic, study design, a non-probability (purposive) of (159 teachers) who agreed to take part in the research, data were collected from 10 April 2021 to 10 Jun, the questionnaire consists of questions including social and demographic information, and the other parts five domains about the definition of disease.

Results: The results show that the majority of the study sample were female, their age between (20-29) years, married, residence in the periphery, their educational level was university, economic status was enough, and all the study sample have a moderate Knowledge about epilepsy.

Conclusions: Based on the result obtained from the data analysis, the results of the study show different changes in the knowledge of the teachers it was concluded that the major deadlock of teachers.

Also, not only first aid, even their lack of information on the signs and symptoms of the disease has an important role, as if the teacher does not know the unique or different from the common symptom, he may be late in assisting the student, and this poses a threat to his health and life.

Recommendations: Give teachers educational courses about first aid for the students saving their life and keeping them away from the source of danger which also includes information about the disease in general and not only about the epileptic seizure.

The Ministry of Education's recommendation is to activate the school health system to increase teachers' awareness of chronic diseases and sudden attacks.