FACTORS INFLUENCING NURSES’ PARTICIPATION IN CLINICAL RESEARCH : A CROSS-SECTIONAL SURVEY IN HOSPITAL PUTRAJAYA, MALAYSIA

Abstract

Background: Although the nurses in Malaysia are shouldering an important daily responsibility for providing optimal nursing care to the patients, Bashar (2019) had noted that a majority of nurses who were working in a public teaching hospital in Malaysia had rarely applied evidence-based practice (EBP) when discharging their daily duties and responsibilities, despite having a positive attitude toward evidence-based nursing (EBN). Therefore, it seems likely for these Malaysian nurses to be encountering many barriers in their involvement in clinical research [and also in research utilization (RU)]. Objective: This cross-sectional survey utilized a self-administered questionnaire within a study population of the Malaysian nurses working in a government hospital to determine the level of involvement of nurses in clinical research at Hospital Putrajaya from May to August 2015, which led to an assessment of the level of association between a list of pre-specified demographic and job-related characteristics and the involvement of nurses in clinical research, in order to identify any plausible factors which might have an association with either facilitating or hindering these nurses from their involvement in clinical research. Methods: After having prepared and validated the self-administered questionnaires for this study, they were then distributed to a total of 406 nurses working in Hospital Putrajaya. This self-administered questionnaire was specifically designed to achieve the objectives of this study which aimed to collect the baseline socio-demographic information of the respondents, and also information pertaining to their nursing practice and their participation in activities that were related to nursing research. Results: This study had found that among 406 nurses from Hospital Putrajaya who received the questionnaires, a total of 300 nurses had completed this questionnaire, meaning that the response rate was 300/406 or 73.9%. The baseline socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents were mostly female (94.3%), of Malay ethnicity (94.0%), with a mean age of 30.9 years, having an average 7.9 years of service and were married (77.3%). Most of these respondents were Staff Nurses (75.2%), followed by Community Nurses (13.1%), Sister-KUP (7.7%) and Sister (4.0%). A majority of the respondents reported that they were not interested in doing research (59.7%) and the two main reasons for their lack of interest in doing research was that they had no interest in research (41.7%) and also they did not have enough time to do research (25.7%). Less than half of the nurse respondents were previously involved in research (31.5%), in several specific areas such as clinical trials (36.6%) and also research in the field of preventive medicine (19.4%).The reason for them not being involved in research before was that (i) they had no opportunity to do research (43.7%) and (ii) they were not interested in research (27.4%). Only 19.9% of the respondents had received additional training in statistics, 14.9% of them had previously used a statistical package for analyzing data, and 3.4% of them had a prior experience of publishing research articles in scientific journals. They also reported that they did not read journals regularly (58.1%) and were not confident in interpreting medical literature (69.0%). Conclusion: Our findings in this study had shown that both the proportion of Malaysian nurses who were interested in clinical research (40.3%) and also those with prior experience in conducting clinical research (31.5%) remained very low. Results of this study also showed that these Malaysian nurses might have encountered various barriers in their quest for their involvement in clinical research and utilizing these findings in their daily nursing practice. Two of the most important barriers identified by this study are (i) the lack of having undergone appropriate training in research methodology and also (ii) the lack of the necessary statistical expertise for analyzing research findings. Hence, this study provides valuable information for formulating strategies to increase nurses’ participation in research activities at Hospital Putrajaya by providing more research training opportunities, and enhancing the level of awareness and increasing the accessibility to these resources by the nurses. It is our sincere hope that the results obtained from this study can be aptly utilized for promoting quality and ethical research among the nurses at Hospital Putrajaya by providing adequate support to and facilitating their future research endeavours.