Assessing Knowledge & Attitude of Health Professionals Towards Anesthesia and the Anesthetist's Role.

Overview

Misconceptions about anesthesia and anesthetists in the health professional community may limit anesthetists' participation in their roles. These misconceptions affect the morals of anesthetists since their activity will be limited only to operation theater and the community at large, who did not get the desired care. Improving health professionals' awareness of anesthesia will make it easier for anesthetists to practice their full role and to develop a sense of validation by having their importance acknowledged. Moreover, society will gate the care offered by the anesthetist in different places of medical care.

Data were collected using self-administered, pretested questionnaires prepared in english and then translated into amharic. The Amharic version of the questionnaire was assessed for compatibility with the english version by a group of people who converted it back to english and compared the converted versions. The questionnaire consists of three parts. The first part was about socio-demographic characteristics; the second part was about participants' knowledge about anesthesia; and the third part was about professionals' attitudes towards anesthesia. After informing each participant about the purpose of the study and obtaining informed consent, data collection began. After the questionnaires were filled out by the participants, the two trained data collectors compiled and checked the data for any conflicts that may have occurred during the data collection. The development and translation of the questionnaire was the most challenging task, and it was developed by both the anesthetists and anesthesiologists. The questionnaire was pre-tested on 25 randomly selected health professionals. After pre-testing, some questions were modified to make them more understandable. Attitude-related questions were answered as strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, and none. the investigators prepared a total of 15 knowledge-related questions, of them 10 were closed-ended and could be scored objectively.

Conditions