Assessment of Nurses’ Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding Deaf-Mute Patients’ Care in Healthcare Setting

Introduction: Communication barrier between nurses and deaf-mute patient is one the stressors in nursing practice because of the disbelief of caregivers which sometime makes angers patients, making caregiver-patient communication more difficult and consequently will hamper the nursing care of patient’s outcomes. The knowledge of sign language (SL) among nurses has not seen a place in the development of nursing and medical training curricula in general in Burundi. This inhibits communication between caregivers and deaf-mute patients. Our study aims to assess nurses’ knowledge and attitudes regarding deaf-mutes’ patients in healthcare settings. Methods: A hospital-based cross-sectional study design was used to assess the nurse’s knowledge and attitude regarding deaf-mute patients’ care among nurses who work in ICU, Internal medicine and obstetrics and gynecology unit of Gitaga Regional Hospital (GRH) and all nurses of Mushasha Health Center. A convenience sampling method was used to invite all nurses working in these two healthcare facilities to participate in our study. A self-report method involving questionnaire completion with three components addressing demographic data, participants’ knowledge and attitudes was used to collect data which were later on analyzed by SPSS version 21. Results: The current study shows that the participants’ knowledge regarding nursing care of deaf-mutes’ patients were significantly poor among nurses, as they scored less than 32% for all variables used to assess their knowledge, even though their overall knowledge score compared to their demographic characteristics was moderate (51.2%). This knowledge was significant related to the age group, length of time in the unity, education level and specific training on health management of deaf-mutes’ patients (p-value <0.005) Most of the participants (95.10%) affirm that they did not learn nursing care applied to deaf-mutes’ patients and did not know how to differentiate a deaf-mute patient who is sick from those who are not (63.40%). Their attitude was quite good even though they did not have a good knowledge regarding nursing care of deaf-mutes’ patients. They argue that they were confused (41.5%) or could be afraid (31.7%) because it wasn’t easy to communicate with deaf-mute patients (97.6%), as majority of them (80.5%) had already got deaf-mute patients in workplace. After all, all our participants said they would like learning sign language to better communicate with their deaf-mutes’ patients. Conclusion: This study shows a poor knowledge regarding nursing care of deaf-mutes’ patients among nurses at GRH and Mushasha health center because of lack of nursing skills in regard to deaf-mute nursing care. This could make nurses confused or afraid when it comes to taking care of deaf-mute patients. Curriculum revision, and in-service training on nursing care of deaf mute were highly recommended as all participants would like to learn sing language.