Journal of Nursing & Care

Introduction: Neonatal mortality constitutes a major public health problem. Ethiopia has made a great progress on institutionalization of deliveries where deliveries are mainly facilitated by midwives and nurses by providing essential newborn care. Hence, assessing the knowledge of these professionals is a primary concern. Therefore, this study is intended to identify knowledge gap on essential newborn care.

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the knowledge of essential newborn care and associated factors.

Methods: Facility based cross-sectional study was conducted. All nurses and midwives who provide delivery and neonatal care were involved in the study. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to participants to collect data and facilitated by data collectors. Data was entered to statistical package for social sciences version 21 and analyzed. Finally, the results were illustrated in the form of text, tables and graphs.

Results: The mean knowledge score of study participants was 12.66. The study revealed that 55% of the respondents had good knowledge of essential newborn care. Field of study was found to have significant association with the knowledge of essential newborn care

Conclusion: The study population had poor knowledge on some aspects of essential newborn care. Field of study was found to be independent predictor of knowledge. Therefore, strengthening and incorporation of all components of essential newborn care in the curriculum was recommended.

Introduction: Dysphagia is related to swallowing and it is mostly associated with increase age, cerebral vascular disease, and dementia. Dysphagia increases the risk of aspiration pneumonia and readmission among elderly ill patients.

Methodology: The review of the literature was conducted through databases: Cochrane and PubMed.

Results: good oral hygiene care to their patients to prevent aspiration pneumonia .Senior citizens are prone to poor oral hygiene care because of dental disease and lack of oral hygiene care .Poor dentition increase bacterial oral infection chances, and secretion, lung aspiration, and aspiration pneumonia . There is a great risk of developing dehydration and malnutrition with increase fluid viscosity. Similarly, postural compensation should only recommend after careful swallowing assessment. Therefore, the results of thickeners in reducing the incidence of aspiration pneumonia are mixed. The imbalance in nutrition and aspiration is the most common indication for tube feeding in dysphagia patients. Expiratory muscle strength training is a swallowing rehabilitation technique for the restoration of swallowing functions. In summarization, interventions that showed that strongest evidence in preventing aspiration pneumonia were good oral hygiene. Good oral healthcare should be encouraged and reinforced in elderly patients. In limitations, potential confounders affecting the risk of aspiration pneumonia were unaddressed in all studies. Consequently, more robust research studies are required on the severity of dysphagia and to address potential confounders.

Introduction: The World Health Organization defined palliative care as ‘‘an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing problems associated with life-threatening diseases, through prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable evaluation and treatment of pain and other physical, psychosocial, and spiritual problems.' In Africa, including Ethiopia, due to limited development of palliative care, many patients have not received formal palliative care. However, there are very limited studies on palliative care in Ethiopia, especially in the study area.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the knowledge and attitude toward palliative care among nurses working in Public Hospitals of the South Gondar Zone, northwest Ethiopia, 2020.

Methods: A facility-based cross-sectional study design was conducted. All nurses (402) working in all public hospitals in the South Gondar Zone was included in the study. The collected data were verified for completeness, edited, coded manually, entered into Epi Data version 4.2 and exported to SPSS version 22.00 for analysis. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the outcome variables.

Results: This study revealed that 304 (78.55%) of the respondents had inadequate knowledge and 273 (70.54%) also had an unfavorable attitude towards palliative care. In general, the level of education of nurses and the year of work experience showed a significant association with the knowledge and attitude of nurses towards palliative care.

Conclusion: This study revealed that most nurses had inadequate knowledge and an unfavorable attitude toward palliative care. Therefore, all the concerned bodies, including nurses, must work together to improve the knowledge and attitude of nurses towards palliative care by providing sustainable training and involving the philosophy of palliative care in nursing education to expand the limited palliative care service in the area and the country at large. Knowledge, Attitude, Palliative Care and Nurses