Health Educatation Activities of The Nurses Working ？n The Primary Care Health Services Towards Disabled Persons

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine the health education activities of the nurses working in the primary care health services towards disabled persons and the challenges they encounter. Method: The sampling of the study consisted of 181 nurses employed in primary care health institutions located in the South Region of Istanbul’s Anatolian Side. The data was collected by using a survey including 18 questions which were related with the subjects’ demographic characteristics, their health training activities towards disabled persons, and the difficulties they faced during the training. Findings: 87.3% of the nurses stated that they have rarely provided care for the disabled while they are at work. 60.2% of them trained the individual and the family together. 64.6 % determined their training needs according to their own judgements. 51.9% applied a standard training curriculum while 95.6% expressed that their institution does not have any training materials towards people with disabilities. The subjects ordered the difficulties they experienced during their training of the disabled as follows: the lack of adequate training materials (62.4%); not knowing how to approach the disabled (45.3%); having not enough time to allocate for training (38.7%); and feeling themselves incompetent (26 %). The subjects stated that they have had difficulty mostly in providing training for the people with mental disabilities (58.7%) while 76.2% expressed that health professionals have to receive training about how to approach the disabled. Conclusion: It was found that there is not a statistically significant difference between the socio-demographic characteristics of the nurses and the health education activities towards the disabled persons and the difficulties experienced