Abstract
In emergency medicine, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is one of the most stressful scenarios for nurses who conduct both basic and advanced resuscitation methods.
This study aimed to assess nurses' self-assessed capabilities, attitudes, and stress related to CPR.
This cross-sectional, observational study was carried out on 748 pediatric nurses at six governmental hospitals. A self-assessed ability questionnaire and a structured stress and attitude questionnaire was used for data collection.
For self-assessed abilities, 45.5% of the nurses had moderate scores. Concerning stress, 48.3% had moderate scores and 63.1% negative attitudes. Also, attitude and self-assessed abilities had a high-frequency negative effect on stress scores (
<0.05).
Attitude scores increased and stress scores decreased significantly with postgraduate educational level, attendance at training courses on pediatric basic life support and automated external defibrillator use, being exposed to >10 cardiac arrest cases in the previous year, and having an advanced life-support license (
<0.05). Positive attitudes and improving self-assessed abilities decreased the nurses' stress levels related to CPR.