Management of Epilepsy: Knowledge and Practises of Nurses in Buea Regional Hospital, South-West Region of Cameroon

The study was geared towards assessing the knowledge and practices demonstrated by nurses in the management of epilepsy in the Buea Regional Hospital in the South-West Region of Cameroon. Most often, patients are not well attended to at the onset of crises. This inevitably complicates the seizure and may even lead to death. In order guide us in our study, two objectives were formulated and we developed a structured questionnaire there from. A total of fifty nurses from various ranks and categories were interviewed on the subject under study. Their responses were analysed through descriptive statistics and presented in form of charts and tables. The results revealed that more than half of the nurses were not university graduates; consequently, about 70 percent of the interviewees did not define epilepsy correctly. Sixty percent of them attributed the cause of the disease to malaria and meningitis and only 30 percent could identify the types of seizures. This made more than one third (36 percent) to still demonstrate wrong reactions when faced with a case of epilepsy. At least two third could administer the proper medication patients with the pathology. We could note that much is still to be done in raising the level of knowledge of nurses on the management of epilepsy and suggest that hospital management ensure their regular upgrading and retraining especially on non-communicable chronic diseases.