Knowledge of the postgraduate health family program nurses on nutrition

Abstract

Objective: To analyze the profile and the nutritional knowledge of nurse students specializing in Family Health in a University of Minas Gerais. Materials and Methods: Cross sectional study with nurses (n=18) from the postgraduate program at a university in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Data collection was performed trough questionnaire application. The first one was composed of socio-demographic information. The second instrument contained 20 questions on general knowledge in nutrition, selected by the authors through a specific literature review on the subject. In the nutrition questionnaire analyses, we carried out test-retest reliability and Cronbach's alpha test for two professional nutritionists (α=0.95). The construction of the database and descriptive analysis was performed in SPSS version 17. Results: The sociodemographic variables that contributed most to the formation of the clusters were: marital status (p=0.040) and the presence of a nutritionist on staff (p=0.001). The first cluster was formed by female nurses (76.5%), not married (66.7%), living in the county (90.9%), working in the family health strategy (69.2%) and that had no nutritionist in the team (100.0%). The association between the number of correct answers about nutrition knowledge and the clusters was performed by the Mann-Whitney test. The mean score was 10.9 (±1.5) in cluster 1 and 13.8 (±1.9) in cluster 2, and the difference was statistically significant (p=0.021). Conclusion: We concluded that nurses who have nutritionists on staff had adequate knowledge related to different aspects of nutrition.