Abstracts

Rationale: The quality of patient care and safety largely depends on the knowledge and experience of nursing staff. Only few nursing staff in Argentina have formal epilepsy training and its important to have good assessment skills to recognize patients who are at risk of acute illness after invasive procedures or antiepileptics drugs withdrawal. Objectives : The training course was designed to measure knowledge of seizures, epilepsy, paroxistic event management and ictal spect procedures. Tests were carried out before and afterwards to measure the impact of the training course.Methods: Ten nurses working in the Video EEG unit with previous knowledge of neurological patients took part in the study. The nurses were tested before the training with a questionnaire containing 8 items relating to basic concepts, 1 item regarding previous experience in ictal spect procedures and the final item asked if they thought their previous knowledge was sufficient to answer the questionnaire. After the initial test the nurses were provided with 9 hours of training divided up over 3 days.Results: The initial questionnaire showed that 60% of the basic concept questions were answered incorrect despite had been answered to have enough knowledge to complete the questionnaire. Specific information about ictal spect procedure was answered correct even in nurses without previous experience. The nurses were asked about the training afterwards and 100% said said it was useful for their daily routine and wanted further study material on the subject.Conclusions: Structural educational program to assess level of competence, providing specific epilepsy education was useful for this nurse population, even in those with previous experience in the field. After reviewing the literature there is no published data about this topic in latinoamerica.