Intervention Study About Health Education Of The Nursing Of The Aged Dementia To Nurses In Nursing Homes

As the changes of societies and family patterns, China is experiencing the transition from traditional"family endowment"to modern"society endowment". Nurses in nursing homes are requested more and more strictly. On February 11th in 2002, Ministry of Labor and Social Security.PRC published《The National Standards for Nurses in Nursing Homes》, which symbolized the lack of operation norms and national standards of nurses in nursing homes had come to an end. But now the general characters of nurses are not pleasant, because there are still a series of problems, such as low cultural degree, big mobility, and less criterion of operation, which will surely influence the qualities of nursing to the old in nursing homes, especially those who are senile dementia and need special care and love. As previous dates show, senile dementia is one of the common diseases which badly affect the health of aged people. The disease incidences and sickness rates of senile dementia increase with the age almost in exponential growth. For example, in China there are nearly one million new patients every year. Even though, there aren't effective and ideal cure methods to senile dementia now. As the"empty nest"families keep increasing in modern society, many families decide to take the aged people diagnosed senile dementia to society nursing homes where take care of the old instead of them. As the main part of aged nursing in society, nursing homes are responsible for providing kinds of care and services, including of the nursing of living, medical rehabilitation, mentality, and so on. However the abilities and characters of the nurses are the precondition and basic of prognosis of the disease and qualities of living of aged dementia. So, based on the first investigation of the nurses'nursing knowledge and skill of senile dementia, we carried out intervention study about health education in this field.Objective Using the intervention to nurses about their knowledge, attitude/belief, and practice (KAP/KBP) of the nursing of senile dementia in the PRECEDE-PROCEED health education mode, this study discussed to build a new health education mode which is more scientific, reasonable and feasible, aiming directly at nurses in nursing homes, this special occupation crowds in our country, in order to promote and improve the professional education level and professional ability of nurses and to serve for the old better.Methods From 205 nurses in 8 nursing homes in Xi'an, randomly select 4 nursing homes (104 nurses) as experimental group, namely the PRECEDE-PROCEED mode educating group; the other 4 nursing homes (101 nurses) as control group, namely the normally educating group. There are no significant differences in ages, sexes, educational level and working lifetime between two groups after balancing check. In experimental group, referring to the PRECEDE-PROCEED mode set up by Green and Kreuter, intervention study is made from factors of tendency, contribution and reinforcement; in the control group, the health education intervention study is general. The time of education intervention is 6 month. Study tool is self-designed KAP investigation evaluation scale of the nursing of senile dementia. Study separately investigated and evaluated the KAP of the nursing of senile dementia in the two groups before and after education intervention. Results Findings are as follow1.Base line of KAP before intervention show: nurses had more positive, correct belief and attitude to care dementias, with an accuracy of 73.39% at average; but when referring to the knowledge and skill of the nursing of senile dementia, they didn't perform well, and in details, the highest average accuracy was the nursing of safe, and next was the nursing of disease and living, and the lowest was mentality and skill, just 42.7% and 47.31%. Results showed the unity of knowledge and practice.2.Intervention results show: After the intervention of PRECEDE-PROCEED mode, nurses in experimental group had a significant improvement in KAP of the nursing of dementia, and there was a significant difference in statistics (P<0.05). However, among the scores in KAP in control group after intervention, only scores in knowledge were higher than before, and the other two was almost unchanged. This result show that on knowledge education the two modes get similar effects, while the superiority of PRECEDE-PROCEED mode is mainly on the practice and skill.Conclusion Taking the PRECEDE-PROCEED mode as a reference, this study made the health education plan for nurses to nursing senile dementia. After carried out for 6 months, the consequence of this study confirmed that PRECEDE-PROCEED mode was effective in the KAP education of the nursing of senile dementias, by evaluating the effect through the scores of KAP. We hope that this study can provide some experience and basis for professional training and education mode building for nurses. We also hope with effective health education, the general character of nurses in nursing homes and the qualities of parents'living can be improved.