Knowledge and attitudes about epilepsy of nursing students

Epilepsy is a chronic sickness that could happen to anybody, regardless of race, sex, age and class, with convulsive seizures, and with a high ratio of death despite the available diagnosis and treatments.Epilepsy patients can generally live a normal life if they take care of some important points. On the other hand, the society?s lack of knowledge make the patients lives even moredifficult and make it inefficient. Epilepsy patients? biggest problems are their embarrasmentof their condition, not being able to prevent their seizures, have a seizure in a crowded place,the fear of losing their jobs, their spouses, having problems driving their cars. Here comes theimportance of nursing. To prevent epileptic people having negative attitude and prejudices,first the nurses have to have an extended knowledgeabout this condition. This research is acomplementary, identifying research with the aim to inform studentnurses evaluate their information and attitude.The universe of the research consists of the 1-4th grade students in a nursery post graduate institute in Istanbul. The tool to gather information is a 39 article questionnaire by the researcher which evaluates the students? knowledge and attitude towards the epilepsy. Theanalysis ofthe inpout is done by SPSS ststistical tool. The undergraduate nurses are observedto have sufficient knowledge about epilepsy to treat epilepsy patients. As the class and agerises, the knowledge is observed to raise with a statistically expected level.Students who know an epilepsy patient show more positive attitude than the averagetowards the condition. Some of them declared that there were certain boundaries in epilepsypatients? lives and that they isolate themselves and can not be working in same jobs with othernormal people. It is recommended that the content of educational programmes in nurse schollsshould be enriched in terms of epilepsy content and the trainings about epilepsy shouldinclude the condition in all aspects.