Attitude of nursing personnel toward disabled persons and performance of rehabilitative aspects of nursing care

Questionnaires were distributed to 198 registered nurses and 1979 licensed practical nurses in five hospitals to determine: 1) their attitude toward disabled persons through response to the Attitude Toward Disabled Persons Scale, developed by the Human Resources Foundation; 2) their performance level of the rehabilitative aspects of nursing care through response to the Performance of Rehabilitative Aspects of Nursing Care Scale, developed by the author; and 3) the correlation of attitude with performance. It was expected that attitude and performance would be correlated; a low, but significant correlation of .19 (p = .01) was found. It was also expected that registered nurses, by virtue of their higher level of educational preparation, would score higher on both instruments, but the results did not show this to be so. There was no significant difference in either attitude or performance between the two levels of nursing personnel. Mean score of the two scales revealed that nursing personnel exhibited somewhat lower levels of attitude and performance scores than would be considered, in the opinion of the author, to be indicative of an accepting attitude toward the disabled person and the performance of a high quality of nursing care in relation to the rehabilitative needs of patients. Although generalizations made from the results of this study should be drawn with caution, some inferences can be derived which have implications for the future provision of a high quality of nursing care.