Assessment of Nursing knowledge, attitudes and practices at the hospitals toward child maltreatment

The purpose of our study is to assess the nurse's knowledge, attitudes and practices at the hospital toward child maltreatment. The sample contains \200\ nurses who were interviewed, received questionnaires, working in emergency departments at six hospitals distributed in Damascus, Lattakia, Tartous. Results show: Knowledge deficiency about problem particularly when scientific qualification level decreases; Knowledge was not affected by age, sex, experience range, salary. Nurses' attitudes were neutral. Attitudes were affected by experience range, scientific qualification level, knowledge level, violence through childhood, but were not affected by age, sex, salary. Most of them didn’t practice nursing care toward child violence. Nursing practices were not affected by their attitudes or violence through childhood. More than half did not receive violence through childhood. We recommend teaching nurses everything that is related to the subject, finding integration work team that can deal with violent clients at the hospital, activating the hospital's special laws which deal with violent children, searching to discover other problems from which nursing suffers.