Iran Journal of Nursing

Background and purpose: Pressure ulcers are one of the most important challenges in hospitals that endanger patient safety and bring a significant financial burden to the patient, family, and health care organization. It has a great impact on the quality of life physically, psychologically and socially, which leads to pain, increased length of hospitalization and rehabilitation. Pressure ulcers occur as a result of a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and one important extrinsic factor is the competence of health care professionals. Competence including knowledge, attitude and performance can be acquired and provided through electronic education and learning in the form of social network-based education. This study was conducted with the aim of determining the effect of pressure ulcer prevention training based on virtual social network on the knowledge, attitude and performance of special care nurses.
Methodology: The present study was an evaluation study with a single group pre-test-post-test design on 73 nurses. The sampling method was continuous sampling was carried out in the period from April to January 2022, in which the evaluation of the effect of pressure ulcer prevention training based on virtual social network on the knowledge, attitude and performance of nurses in special care departments, in the treatment centers of Firozgar Hospital Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was examined and compared in a group before and after the test. In order to carry out this research, at first, 80 nurses who met the inclusion criteria were included in the study by proportional stratified sampling method. Due to the fact that 3 participants did not complete the questionnaire and 4 participants were excluded from the present study due to their refusal to participate in the study, a total of 73 participants, questionnaires, demographic characteristics and measurement tools, knowledge, attitude and performance of nurses They completed pre-training on pressure ulcer prevention. According to the entry criteria, with an active What Sapp user account and access to the Internet, the study participants were joined by the researcher in a WhatsApp group. The educational content was shared for the nurses participating in the study in the group formed during the week through the WhatsApp social network. The educational content was in the form of short text, audio, animation, pictures and videos. Then, one month after completing the training, the nurses participating in the study were asked to complete the knowledge, attitude and performance questionnaires. To analyze the data, first, using descriptive statistics methods, frequency distribution tables were set up, and the numerical indices of the quantitative variables were calculated separately for two groups, and then the paired t-test was used to compare the knowledge, attitude and performance of the nurses. And SPSS V.22 software was used to check and analyze the data. And a significance level of less than 05% was considered..
Findings: The average knowledge acquired by the nurses before the intervention was 64.47±10.61, but after the intervention it was 70.47±10.48 and based on the result of the paired t-test, this difference was significant. Before the intervention, 61.6% of the nurses' attitudes were positive, but after the intervention, 56.2% of the nurses had a positive attitude. The result of the paired t-test indicated that there was no statistically significant difference in the attitude before and after the intervention of the nurses in the study. Before the intervention, the performance of 78.1% of the nurses in the study was poor, and after the intervention, 65.8% of the nurses had poor performance and 34.2% of the nurses had good performance. The result of the paired t-test showed that the performance of nurses before and after the training did not have a statistically significant difference.
Conclusion: In this study, training with social networks led to an increase in the knowledge of preventing pressure ulcers in nurses, the attitude and performance of nurses before and after the training did not have a statistically significant difference. In addition to using social networks, there is a need to The use of today's technologies, with continuous repetition of training, provision of face-to-face practical training and the use of patient safety strategies for the prevention of pressure ulcers, the knowledge, attitude and performance of nurses in the prevention of pressure ulcers should be increased.