Abstract

Palliative care is the specialized medical and total care of those patients who are suffering from life limiting illnesses by a specially trained team of doctors, nurses and other professionals or specialists who work together in a team to provide care to the patients. Here, the disease is no longer responsive to the curative treatment or life prolonging treatments. The study objectives were (1) To assess the existing knowledge regarding palliative care among staff nurses (2) To find association between the knowledge regarding Palliative Care with selected demographic variables. Research approach used was descriptive approach which is a non-experimental design. The target population for the study was the Staff Nurses of selected hospitals of Central Region of Gujarat State and was selected by nonprobability purposive sampling technique. The total samples under the study were 50 Staff Nurses. The data collection was done through structured knowledge questionnaire which was intended to assess the knowledge of the Staff Nurses regarding the Palliative care. The results were established by using descriptive and inferential statistics. Data represents that 42 (84%) samples belonged to the age group of 21-31 years which is highest, 37 (74 %) samples were GNM and 12 (24%) samples were B.Sc and 1 (2%) samples were PB.B.Sc, 24 (48 %) samples had more than 5 years of clinical experience and 26 (52 %) samples had less than 5 years of clinical experience, 33 (66% ) samples were working in general wards, 2 (4%) samples were working in Labour Room, 6 (12 %) samples were working in O.P.D., 9 (18 %) samples were working in I.C.U., 17 (34 %) samples have undergone training related to Palliative care and 33 (66%) samples have not undergone any training related to Palliative care, majority 38 (76%) of staff nurses have moderately adequate level of knowledge and 6 (12%) of staff nurses have inadequate level of knowledge and 6 (12%) of staff nurses have adequate level of knowledge. There was no significant association between the knowledge scores and the demographic variables.

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