Effect of Educational Empowerment on Student Nurses’ Knowledge, Practice, and Attitude toward Genomic Counselling

Abstract

Context: All over the world, the increased awareness of the importance of early diagnosis of genetic diseases has given them priority in primary health care. However, more recent surveys indicate that genetics content is still lacking in nursing curricula.

Aim: Evaluate the effect of educational empowerment on student nurses' knowledge, practice, and attitude toward genomic counseling.

Methods: Quasi-experimental (pre/posttest) design was utilized to collect the data of this study. The study was conducted at the Faculty of Nursing affiliated to Ain Shams University. The subjects were all available adolescent nursing students who enrolled in the pediatric and obstetric course in the third year. The study sample was composed of 340 nursing students. Researchers used a self-administered questionnaire that includes characteristics of subjects and the assessment of knowledge, attitude, and practice of students.

Results: 47.65% of the studied students had poor knowledge at the pre-educational program phase. In comparison, 55.88% had good knowledge at the post educational program, with a highly significant difference at p-value <0.01. There was a highly significant difference between studied students' attitudes toward genetic disease, health history benefits, genetic examination benefits, genomic counseling, follow-up, and decision-making process domains at pre and post-educational program at p-value <0.001. Also, the results reveal that 79.41% of studied students had unsatisfactory practice at the pre-educational program, while 70.59% of them had satisfactory practice at post educational program. There was a highly positive correlation between knowledge, practice, and attitude of studied students about genomic counseling at the pre-educational program.

Conclusion: Educational empowerment positively affected adolescent nursing students' knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding genomic counseling. The study recommended continuous training for adolescent nursing students about genetic counseling to prepare them for their future roles. Future studies are needed to examine the relationship between knowledge, attitude, and practice of adolescent nursing students regarding genomic counseling.