Educating Nurses about Safety measures in Handling Chemotherapy Drugs: A Pre-experimental Study

Abstract

Background: Chemotherapy is used to treat cancer. Occupational exposure to chemotherapy drugs produce many side effects and continue to be a hazard in health care setting. It is therefore highly important for oncology nurses to apply proper drug handling technique and procedures with great care to prevent such exposure.
Objectives: 1. To assess the level of existing knowledge of student nurses regarding safety measures in handling of chemotherapy drugs. 2. To determine the post-test level knowledge of student nurses regarding safety measures in handling of chemotherapy drugs. 3. To evaluate the effectiveness of structured teaching programme on knowledge regarding safety measures in handling of chemotherapy drugs. 4. To associate the post-test knowledge scores of the student nurses regarding safety measures in handling of chemotherapy drugs with their selected demographic variables.
Design: Pre-experimental one group pre test post test design was selected for the study. Fifty 2nd year GNM
students were selected through non-probability convenience sampling technique. A self-structured knowledge questionnaire was used to collect the data.
Result: Findings of the study revealed that 36(72%) participants had inadequate knowledge & 13(26%) participants had moderately adequate knowledge in pre test. 28(56%) of the participants had adequate knowledge and 22(44%) had moderately adequate knowledge in post test. The obtained “t” value -12.22 was found to be highly significant at p<0.05 level.
Conclusion: Teaching programmes are effective in improving the knowledge and hence must be conducted at regular intervals to retain the information.