Abstract:

Background:
Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a metabolic disease whose prevalence keeps rising. In 2025 every tenth citizen of the Czech Republic is supposed to be affected by it. It is a disease that still cannot be cured today. However, it has been verified that effective complex therapy including therapeutic education and nursing care decrease the risk of severe complications of DM, and increase life quality of people with DM. Quality and safe nursing care for persons with DM can only be provided by an educated registered nurse. The question is whether completion of the qualification study program ensures that nurses will have adequate knowledge in this field.

Goal:
To ascertain the knowledge of the respondents in the field of nursing care in diabetology.

Methods:
The respondents - recent graduates of the bachelor study program of Registered Nurse in college, or Certified Registered Nurse at a specialized nursing college (NC). The technique of data collection – a questionnaire containing objectively scorable verification didactic test (50 semi-opened test items), content analysis of test questions that have been answered. The maximum number of points was 100 (0 – zero, bad answer, 1 – partially correct answer, 2 – correct answer).

Results:
382 respondents took part in the project, out of whom 219 (i.e. 57.3%) were students of the bachelor’s college program, and 163 (42.7%) students of nursing college. The respondents were aged 20 to 51, 25 on average, and gained 0 to 86 points on the test, 30 on average. The overall level of knowledge did not differ much in the individual groups (school, field of study, age of the respondents, form of study, interest in the field of diabetology, etc.). However, it was proven that with an increasing interest of the respondents in the field of diabetology their test score increases too. Content analysis (which enabled us, among others, to assess frequency and quality of incorrectly answered questions), showed that if the respondents did not have proper knowledge in the field, they are not able to actively fill correct answers in the test. Immature individuals can even react improperly (vulgar answers).

Conclusion:
The results of the survey show inadequate qualification preparation of registered nurses in nursing care in diabetology. It is necessary to improve the possibilities of education in diabetology within qualification study (including diabetology as a compulsory optional subject), just like to prepare adequate postgraduate education for nurses in diabetology.
The test with semi-opened items did not turn out to be very good. In this case it would be more suitable to use a test with options to choose from, which will be the goal of the next study.

Keywords:

Registered nurse, qualification education, fields of study, diabetes, knowledge, didactic test.