Affiliation:
1. College of Nursing, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh, Uttarakhand, India
Abstract
Background:
Antibiotic misuse is a global threat. In recent years, inadequate awareness and inappropriate adherence to antibiotic prescription have been coupled with frequent self-medication practices.
Aims:
The study aims to assess awareness, perception and practices followed by nurses on antibiotics use at a tertiary care hospital in North India.
Materials and Methods:
This online survey was completed by 232 nurses working at a tertiary care teaching hospital in North India from September to October 2020. A pre-validated questionnaire of awareness, perception and practices was used to collect information. Appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics are used to generate the results.
Results:
The mean age of nurses was 27.84 (±3.06) years, and 60% were male. The majority of the nurses (80.17%) had a graduate degree in nursing, with a professional experience of 6.25 (±5.30) years. More than two-third (87.5%) of nurses are familiar with the word antibiotics resistance. Surprisingly, 47.4% of nurses used antibiotics more than two times without a prescription in the current year. Interestingly, 95.26% of nurses know antibiotics are effective against bacteria and are disease specific (93.79%). Further, 96.55% of nurses said that unnecessary antibiotic use might lead to resistance, and 68.10% agreed to take antibiotics after a doctor’s prescription.
Conclusions:
Self-medication practices were high amongst nurses. Organising more in-service education, intense orientation programmes and instruction-based training needs to intensify nurses on the appropriate use of antibiotics and to set up an antimicrobial stewardship programme at the institute.