| Summary |
In-hospital strokes (IHS) account for one in five strokes; however, IHS patients have higher mortality and are half as likely to be discharged home when compared to community-occurring strokes (Chen et al., 2018). Nurse-driven code stroke responses have been heavily utilized to facilitate timely IHS intervention. However, there is no consistency in reported nurse education and training. The purpose of this dissertation is to determine the stroke knowledge (SK) level of acute care nurses and identify nurse characteristics that may be predictors of SK. A non-experimental, descriptive correlational study sampling nurses caring for adult, hospitalized patients was completed via online survey assessing demographics, stroke education and experience, and the Acute Stroke Management Questionnaire (ASMaQ) to test SK. The sample (N = 196) included mostly female (n=180; 92%), Baccalaureate-prepared nurses (n=131; 67%). There was overall good SK (M = 117.4; SD = 8.1), and six predictor variables were significantly correlated with SK (practice setting, code stroke awareness, activation comfort, and confidence in understanding, self-identified knowledge of acute stroke management, and self-perception of SK). The regression model explains 30.7% of the variance in the ASMaQ total scores, F (6, 189) = 13.93, p [less-than] .001. Findings from this study inform the usage of the ASMaQ as a quick, effective measurement tool for nurses' SK as well as gap areas in nurse SK. |
