Student nurses' knowledge, attitude, and behavior toward chinese medicine and related factors

The purposes of this study were (1) to understand student nurses' knowledge, attitude, and behavior toward Chinese medicine and (2) to explore the related factors. This study was based on a structured questionnaire survey. The subjects of the study were students from the nursing department of one technical university in southern Taiwan. The sampling methods of this study were stratified sampling and cluster sampling. After getting the agreement of the student nurses, the researcher gave out 518 questionnaires to do the test. There were 496 valid questionnaires and the retrieval ratio was 96%. The results were: (1) The highest mean score was for the basic concepts of Chinese medicine and the lowest mean score was for the basic concepts of Chinese herbal medicine. The average correctness rate of knowledge about Chinese medicine was 67.42%. (2) The student nurses had a positive attitude toward Chinese medicine. (3) As for the frequency of seeking Chinese medical treatment, most of the student nurses used common folk tonics of Chinese medicine to recuperate their health. As for the medical treatment of general diseases, muscular and skeletal diseases were the most. (4) The significant common related factors for student nurses' knowledge, attitude, and behavior toward Chinese medicine were " have ever studied the literature of Chinese medicine or Chinese medicine nursing" and " have sources of knowledge on Chinese medicine". The factors "have ever studied the credit points of Chinese medicine", and " all credit points of Chinese medicine that have ever studied" also significantly influenced student nurses' knowledge and attitude toward Chinese medicine. Additionally, there were significantly positive pairwise correlations between student nurses' knowledge, attitude, and behavior toward Chinese medicine. The results of this study suggest that nursing schools should arrange curricula in Chinese medicine as required credits in the education of student nurses and provide student nurses with information on Chinese medicine by various kinds of formal and informal methods to promote the Chinese medicine knowledge, attitude, and behavior of student nurses and to accelerate the personnel cultivation of Chinese medicine nursing in order to meet the needs of society.