A Study to assess the knowledge and opinion regarding care of Mentally handicapped children among nurses in a selected Psychiatric hospital at Bangalore

A study was conducted to assess the knowledge and opinion regarding care of mentally handicapped children among nurses in a selected psychiatric hospital at Bangalore. Non experimental descriptive design was adopted for this study. The convenience sampling technique was used to select 40 samples. The data were gathered and analysed by descriptive and inferential statistical method. The findings revealed that the, 17(42.5%) got poor knowledge, 18(45%) got average knowledge, 5(12.5%) got good knowledge. When considering the opinion, 3 (7.5%) of the nurses have negative opinion, 16(40%) of the nurse’s opinion were neutral, 21(52.5%) had positive opinion and none of them had highly positive or highly negative opinion. Correlation of knowledge with opinion of nurses reveals that the mean knowledge score is 11.38 with SD 2.498 and the mean opinion score is 44.83 with SD 10.749. The coefficient of correlation is 0.313 which shows a positive correlation. Hence H1 is retained. The significant association was found between the knowledge scores of nurses and their selected demographic variables such as age, gender, religion, marital status, professional qualification, area of work, years of experience, family history of MR, experience in care of MR children and source of knowledge, special training/certification area of work, as the obtained χ2 value is lesser than the table value at p<0.05. However significant association was found between the opinion of nurses and their selected demographic variables such as area of work (p<0.05), and highly significant association was found with the variables such as family history of MR, experience in care of MR children and source of knowledge (p<0.001). Hence H2 and H3 is accepted.