Nurses, physicians, and pharmacists: their knowledge of hazards of medications

At a major tertiary care teaching hospital, random samples of 100 nurses, 102 physicians, and all of the hospital's 14 pharmacists were tested on their knowledge of the hazards of medications. The 25-question examination was generated by way of a rigorous validating procedure and was self-administered by the practitioners. Based on a perfect examination score of 100, the group mean scores of the nurses, physicians, and pharmacists were 72.3, 81.3 and 85.1, respectively. A one-way analysis of variance demonstrated that the difference in knowledge among the three groups of practitioners was significant (p less than .001). Pairwise (Scheffe) contrast tests revealed that the difference in knowledge between the physicians and nurses, and the pharmacists and nurses was significant; the nurses proved to be the least knowledgeable of the three practitioner groups. The nurses' scores were analyzed by years of nursing experience, type of educational preparation, hospital service affiliation, and hospital shift. A one-way analysis of variance revealed that there was a significant difference in nurses: knowledge by hospital shift (p less than .05). A posteriori contrast tests (Scheffe) indicated that the group mean score of the day shift nurses (mean = 75.6) was significantly different than the average of the evening and night shift nurses' scores (mean = 69.9).