Nursing personnel's attitudes towards fever and antipyresis of adult patients: cross‐sectional survey

Panagiotis Kiekkas, Evangelos Konstantinou, Kalliopi‐Styliani Psychogiou, Iliana Tsampoula, Nikolaos Stefanopoulos and Nick Bakalis

Journal of Clinical Nursing, 2014, vol. 23, issue 19-20, 2949-2957

Abstract: Aims and objectives To investigate the attitudes of nurses caring for hospitalised adult patients towards fever and antipyresis and to identify the predictors of these attitudes. Background Fever is a host defence mechanism, whose harmful effects are limited to specific patients. Findings about antipyretic treatment have further challenged the need for routine or aggressive fever suppression. Unfortunately, nurses continue to be fever phobic, while their attitudes towards fever and antipyresis considerably affect antipyretic practice. Design Prospective, cross‐sectional, multicentre survey. Methods A convenience sample of registered and assistant nurses employed in surgical/medical wards and intensive care units of nine Greek hospitals was enrolled. The developed questionnaire included 10 multiple‐choice, knowledge‐evaluating items about fever and antipyresis, 10 Likert‐type attitude‐evaluating items towards fever and 10 towards antipyresis. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to identify the predictors of attitudes towards fever and antipyresis. Results The attitudes of the 458 participants were found to be relatively positive towards both fever and antipyresis. Lower fever/antipyresis knowledge score predicted both negative attitude towards fever (p = 0·001) and positive attitude towards antipyresis (p

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.12551

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:jocnur:v:23:y:2014:i:19-20:p:2949-2957

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Clinical Nursing from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().