Global Neuroscience Nurse Training Begins With a Baseline Assessment of Neuroscience Nursing Knowledge

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: Before implementing an educational intervention, there is a need to establish baseline knowledge levels such that the outcome of said intervention can be fairly evaluated. Before developing a structured nursing educational intervention, we aimed to assess nursing knowledge, nursing confidence regarding that knowledge, and the accuracy of the knowledge. METHODS: We distributed a 50-item validated neurological assessment test (NAT) questionnaire to 70 nurses working at a teaching hospital in Kenya. There were no personal identifiers collected and the NAT was made available in both electronic and paper formats to facilitate responses. RESULTS: The 64 nurses who returned the questionnaire had median knowledge scores of 22% (14% to 32%); median confidence scores of 61% (37% to 87%); and median accuracy scores of 38% (31.3% to 45.6%). There was a strong association between confidence and knowledge ( r 2 =0.66;