Nurses as a new stakeholder in genetics and the place of genetics in educational processes: A Study from Turkey

INTRODUCTION: Nurses having post graduate degree are ready to assume clinical and leadership roles in health care systems and should also be prepared to undertake similar roles in genetic / genomic health care services.The purpose of this study was to assess the undergraduate students’ awareness, perception and understanding of various human genetic topics, tests and disorders.
METHODS: This is a descriptive and cross-sectional study. A self-report questionare which was designed to evaluate undergraduate nursing students’ theorotically knowledge of genetic concepts, disease and the perception of students about medical biology and genetic lesson. Two hundred and twenty two pre-licencured nursing students compromised the sample. A 54-item questionnaire prepared by literature-based researchers was used as a data collection tool. Descriptive statistics and Fisher's Exact Test or Pearson Chi-square test were used to analyze the relations between categorical variables.
RESULTS: The majority of nursing students in this study (%70,1) took Medical Biology and Genetic lesson. But, more than half of nursing students (58,1%) reported “No” to adequate level of knowledge about genetic. Competence about genetic were not changed level of class. However, students who taking medical biology and genetic lesson had more genetic disease knowledge than no taking group. The evaluation of responses to the section on basic genetic information showed that the lowest levels of description were prenatal diagnosis (31,5%) and locus (36,9%). Also, 82,4% of the nursing students agreed that nurses’ role in genetic diseases diagnosis.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: With the advances in the field of genetics, there was a need for nursing students to integrate genetic information into nursing practice. It is thought that the results of this study may help to reform and improve the educational strategy related to medical biology and genetics in nursing education.