Awareness of the nurses regarding their genetic counselling roles and determination of their capacity

This research has been done descriptively in order to determine the awareness of the nurses regarding their genetic counselling roles and determination of their capacity. The sample of the research is constituted by 600 nurses working at Gülhane Military Medicine Faculty and Training and Research Hospital. 451 nurses have been reached due to the reasons such as not accepting to participate in the research and be on the maternity leave. The questionnaire form developed by the researcher after the literature examination has been used as the data collection tool. In the analysis of the data, frequency, percentage, Mann Whitney U test, Kruskall – Wallis test have been used. The significance level has been accepted as p<0.05. It has been determined that the average age of the nurses in the scope of the study is 30.8±5.5, 54.6 % are single, 94.4 have bachelors or above degree, 87.1 % work as service nurse, besides, it has been determined that 57.7 % of the nurses acquired knowledge about genetics in any term of their professional life, 81.6 % care about the developments in genetics science, and 32.6 % considers the genetics counselling services in our country as insufficient. It has been determined that the knowledge test average point of the nurses regarding their basic genetics knowledge is 8.25±2.65 and 6.52±1.83 regarding the genetic diseases. At the same time, the units that the nurses work, working statuses, their care about the developments in genetics science, their will whether or not they want to work as genetics counselors (p<0.05) the situation that the genetic counselling services are considered to be sufficient in our country and the inclusion of genetic diseases in the data collection form revealed that there is a significant relation among the average of the basic genetic knowledge test points (p<0.05). In the research, it has been seen thar the genetics knowledge of the nurses and their awaresness about genetic counseling and role responsibilities are insufficient. Therefore, it has been recommend that the nurses be made capable by the pre and post-graduation training programs and further research regarding the subject be done.