Scientific Journal of

  Abstract

 Background and Objectives

 Nurses play an important role in safe use of blood and blood products. Blood safety and effectiveness of transfusion somehow pertain to the knowledge and skills of the nurses who are responsible for. The purpose of this study was to evaluate nurses' knowledge and practice of blood transfusion in hospitals of Arak in 2010.

 Materials and Methods

 In this descriptive cross-sectional study, all nurses in hospitals of Arak participated. Information was collected through questionnaires. Scores of knowledge and practice were arranged to three levels of weak, average and good after recoded in terms of accepted scores. Data were analyzed by statistics-descriptive analysis using SPSS16, Chi Square correlation test and Spearman correlation coefficient.

 Results

 Most people were women (92.9%) and had bachelor degree (99.3%). Average and standard deviation of age and work history were 29.79 ± 5.14 and 6.15 ± 4.76, respectively. Knowledge measurement showed that 50.9% of participants are at good level, 33.5% at the intermediate and 15.6% at the weak level. Self-evaluation of nurses about their practice showed that the majority of subjects (63.9%) have good practice and the rest are at average. There was a significant correlation between knowledge and practice of the nurses (p< 0.001).

 Conclusions

 In this study the majority of nurses' knowledge and performance is satisfactory but there is still the need for more learning about the complications of blood transfusion and care improvement. Therefore, holding educational programs and monitoring managers seem to be necessary.