Assessment of nurses' knowledge about medication hazards at King Hussein Medical Center

Abstract EN

Objective : To assess the effect of years of experience and educational level on the nurses'knowledge about hazards of dispensing and administering medications to patients in the Intensive, Medical / Surgical, and Pediatric wards at King Hussein Medical Center, in order to reduce the possibility of medication errors.

Methods : A questionnaire that consisted of 25 questions based on information selected from the pharmacological literature dealing with the hazards inherent in dispensing and administering medication was used The questions which reflected broad clinical pharmacological principles, were tested for validity by a panel of experts and for reliability by a split half test.

The purposive convenient sample included 50 nursing students and 200 registered nurses with different years of experience and educational preparation.

Results : The overall analysis of the questionnaire results revealed that the total knowledge scores ranged from 40-100 out of 100.

The majority of the participants scored more than 70 %, the average score was 70.6 %.

The nurses' scores were analyzed according to years of nursing experience and type of educational preparation.

A one-way analysis of variance revealed that there was a significant difference in the knowledge of medication hazards among the nursing students who finished the pharmacological course one year ago and other nurses (P < 0.002).

Nurses with Master degrees were more knowledgeable than other groups of nurses (P < 0.05).

Conclusion: Further studies on a.larger sample are needed to assess real knowledge of the nurses, and to improve preventable adverse drug reactions in all practices and hospitals.

The present result in the master degree holders reflects positively on lower level of hierarchy as well as on occurrence of adverse drug reactions knowledge.