[Measurement of nurses and physicians' attitudes towards computer usage in the age of Internet]

We investigated the attitudes of nurses and physicians from a public hospital in Campinas, SP, Brazil, towards computer use in health care, by means of a questionnaire composed of two parts. The first one shows the characteristics of the sample population under study, while the second consisted of a validated Likert style scale with 20 items, six of which show positive attitudes and 14 negative attitudes. We interviewed 20 nurses and 32 physicians. The obtained coefficients for Cronbach's alpha showed a high internal consistency between the items for both groups (nurses and physicians). A positive global attitude was disclosed, indicating receptiveness towards introducing computerized systems. It was also verified that many professionals had been using computers in the last years, coinciding with the evolution of Internet.