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Awareness of Hypertension Guidelines in Clinical Nurses at Acute Hospitals in Taiwan

Tuesday, November 3, 2009: 1:35 PM

Hsiao-Lien Chen, PhD, Candidate
Pei-Wei Liu, BS
Pei-Fen Liu
Nursing Department, Cathay General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

Presentation File (PDF Format)

Learning Objective 1: understand the clinical nurses’ awareness of current suggestion about hypertension management

Learning Objective 2: understand the impacts of nursing related factors on guideline knowledge.

Background & Purposes. Hypertension guideline is though to be important tool to assist clinical nurses to prevent and treat for hypertension. Awareness of guideline in nurses may influence accuracy of clinical practice and education on patients. This study aimed to assess the knowledge of nurses in Taiwan about Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure.

Methods. This study was a cross-sectional survey design. The hypertension management questionnaire (HMQ) was developed by the research team and used to survey 1,462 clinical nurses in 9 acute care hospitals in Taiwan. The HMQ consisted characteristic of nurses (15 items) and questions related to hypertension prevention and management (31 items). The Cronbach’s α of the HMQ was .74. Data were collected from November 2007 to March 2008 and analyzed using descriptive statistic, independent t-test, and one-way ANOVA.

Results. The overall effective response rate was 95.8% (n =1,388). The mean score of HMQ was 21.3 points (total = 31 points). Less than 50 percent of nurses knew the definition of prehypertension (n = 623; 45%) and the basis of antihypertensive medication (n = 693; 49.9%). In contrast, both hypertension assessment and lifestyle modifications were the highest scores of nurses. Nurses who work in intensive care units had higher scores than those of other units (p< .05). Nurses with 20 years working experience had higher scores than those of 2 years working experience nurses (p< .05).

Conclusions. The findings can serve as valuable references for nursing leaders to develop hypertension prevention and management programs for clinical nurses to improve the quality of hypertension care.

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