Child vaccination is one of the important strategies of prevention and control of infectious disease in the Department of Health, Executive Yuan's for disease control. Healthy children are essential for family well-being as well as for the country's future wealth. Multivalent vaccine is constantly introduced which leads to increasing frequency of children receiving the vaccine injection. As we know, the developmental stages of a child’s development are different, the outpatient department nurse serves as guardian of the first line of child immunization work. However, little research has been done to identify influencing factors in outpatient department nurse’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of child vaccinations.
This study investigated influencing factors of childhood vaccination prevention among outpatient department nurse’s knowledge, attitude, and behavior. A cross-sectional descriptive and correlational study is used to collect the data. from four Medical Centers’ outpatient departments in Taipei, Linkou, Taoyuan and Keelung. A total of 230 out of 231 distributed questionnaires were returned giving a 99.6% of valid return rate.
The result showed that all of the subjects were females (100%), the mean age was 40.6 years. The educational background was above the junior college (90.0%), the mean working years were 17.9 years, and the mean working years in outpatient department were 11.3 years. Most than one-quarter (33.0%) of the subjects worked in the pediatric department.
Most of job position was RN (81.7%). Only 20.9% had the experience of implementation of childhood vaccination injection in the past 3 years. Only 24.3% of the subjects had ever received childhood vaccination in-service training, 7.4% had Bacillus Calmette-Guerin Vaccination certificates, and 20% had access to ACLS certificates.
Participants earned a mean childhood vaccination knowledge score of 7.03 (SD = 2.72), a mean childhood vaccination attitude score of 26.02(SD=3.50), and a mean childhood vaccination behavior score of 75.81(SD=19.79).The nursing staff’s sex and marital status had no significant difference in the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of childhood vaccination. The nursing staff’s knowledge, attitude, and behavior of childhood vaccination was related to the age, education level, had child, child’s age, working years, working years in outpatient department, working in outpatient pediatric department, experience of childhood vaccination, accepted in-service training, had Bacillus Calmette-Guerin Vaccination certificates, and had access to ACLS certificates（p<.05）.
Results were shown indicated significant predicators, including experience in pediatric department, experience of childhood vaccination and working years in outpatient department which explained for 41.5% of variance in subjects’ knowledge of childhood vaccination (adjusted R2=0.377).Experience of childhood vaccination explained for14.5% of variance in subjects’ attitude of childhood vaccination (adjusted R2=0.09), and other four factors as age, educational background, child number and job position explained for 21.7% of variance in subjects’ behavior of childhood vaccination scores (adjusted R2=0.166).
The childhood vaccination knowledge, attitude and behavior questionnaire is an effective instrument for assessing the childhood vaccination of outpatient department nurses. Best on results that nursing education strategies shall be subject to enhance new police in childhood vaccination, such as setting information learning network for childhood vaccination, providing a multi-learning, and enhancing participation of nursing education in childhood vaccination, as ways to improve childhood vaccination competencies among the outpatient department nurses.