Summary:
ABSTRACT
Introduction:
Nowadays, heart and vascular diseases are the first cause of death, especially
in developed countries. The most common heart disease is coronary artery
disease. It is a common belief that the best way to treat coronary artery
disease is to prevent it by understanding and controlling the factors that
predetermine it. Health professionals and especially nurses play a key role for
this due to their training and knowledge on this subject.
Objective:
This research has been conducted in order to evaluate nurse’s knowledge on
preventing coronary artery disease.
Method and material:
469 nurses agreed to participate in the research that was used as the basis of
this thesis. This research was conducted by analyzing data that was collected
through questionnaires. The questionnaire distributed contained 25 closed type
questions (multiple choice with only one right answer) refering to participant’
s demographic data and their knowledge on factors that predetermine the
appearance of coronary artery disease.
Results:
As studying the right answers given by the 469 nurses that participated in this
research, it was noticed that the participants aged in the age range of 30-39
years old gave more right answers than the participants between 20-29 years old
and over 40 years old. The same thing was noticed with participants that had
over than 10 years of working experience, who gave more right answers than
participants that had less than 10 years of experience. Nurses holding a
university bachelor degree were more well informed on issues refering to
coronary artery disease and gave more right answers than participants holding a
bachelor degree given by a technological educational institute and participants
who were graduates of secondary education. Participants holding a master’s
degree gave more right answers than the nurses who didn’t hold one giving an
average of correlations of p=0,000, that is considered as a strong correlation.
Nurses occupated in hospitals gave more right answers than nurses occupated in
other departments of the health sector. Nurses working in the hospital’s
cardiology clinics gave more right answers than the rest of their colleagues in
contrast to nurses working in pulmonary clinics who had the lowest rates of
right answers.
Conclusion:
This research reveals that the majority of Greek nurses does not have a
satisfying level of knowledge on coronary artery disease and the factors that
cause it. Due to this, it is necessary that they receive the training that
could help them prevent it and limit it’s appearance on Greek patients. By this
way nurses can help society by being trainers in preventing this disease and
helping people be healthier.
