Evaluation of Educational Program for Nurses Focusing on Sexual Assault

Abstract

Although sexual assault is recognized as a major problem for women's health, there are very few educational programs for nurses that have been developed and tested. The object of this study is to test an educational program for nurses involving nursing care for survivors of sexual assault.
The participants consist of thirty-three nurses. They all joined and attended a training session for seven hours, which training emphasized the importance of their attitude to survivors of sexual assault including the rape myth.
I assessed participants' attitudes toward sexual assault, general knowledge on sexual assault, and their understanding of nursing care for survivors of sexual assault as outcomes. An analysis was done during the pre-training, post-training and a month later as follow-up. To form a comparison group, thirty-three nurses who did not join were selected.
Repeated measures analysis of variance showed a significant change in their attitudes (F=6.848, df=1, p=.011) and improvement in understanding nursing care for survivors of sexual assault (F=28.946, df=1, p<.001) in the intervention.
In conclusion, these findings demonstrate that an educational program is effective to change nurses' attitude to sexual assault and increase their understanding of nursing care.