Knowledge attitude and practice of breast self examination among female graduates in princess muna college of nursing and royal medical services college of allied health professions

Abstract EN

Objective: The aim of our study is to evaluate the knowledge, attitude and practice of Breast Self Examination among female graduates at Princess Muna College of Nursing and Royal Medical Services College of Allied Health Professions.

Methods: self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 276 female students; the questionnaire consisted of four parts comprised of 26 items.

The first part tackles socio-demographic data.

Questions related to the knowledge as to breast cancer were included in the second part.

The third part focused on identifying the participant's awareness of breast cancer and early detection methods.

While the fourth part of the questionnaire handles Breast Self Examination practice among the participants.

Data was analyzed via SPSS software (version 19), statistical analysis were performed including Pearson chi-square test & statistical significance was set at (p) value <0.05.

Results: The overall response rate was (99.6%), while (89.7%) ranging between (20-22) years old, (99.3%) were single.

Knowledge score was recognized at excellent grade for 93.1% of the participants, none of them had unsatisfactory knowledge score (0%).

Despite the excellent knowledge recognized in both faculties, 18.9% of respondents admitted that they don’t know how to perform breast Self Examination.

TV was the most common source of information for about (65.5%) of the participants.

Eighty percent of the respondents performed Breast Self Examination in an irregular manner, while only (10.4%) performed it on monthly basis.

Nearly, half of them preferred to do Breast Self Examination in the morning and in front of mirrors.

About 65% of the participants showed interest to gain more knowledge about Breast Self Examination.

Conclusion: Regular Breast Self Examination proved to be inadequate and thus, efforts should be made to develop programs on increasing knowledge of breast cancer as well as practicing Breast Self Examination based on the fact that a good level of knowledge may help to perform Breast Self Examination correctly, however, it doesn’t play role in performing regular Breast Self Examination on monthly basis.