Published Paper Details:

Pain is a human response to illness; it is experienced by patients suffering from a broad spectrum of diseases. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage". Convenient sampling technique was used to select 100 staff nurses working at selected hospitals of Udupi. Inventory used are Demographic Proforma and Structured knowledge Questionnaire Likert scale to assess the knowledge of nurses regarding benefits of therapeutic foot massage. Ethical clearance and administrative permission were obtained prior to the study. Overall assessment of knowledge score of nurses in that majority 66 (66%) staff nurses had poor knowledge level, 28 (28%) staff nurses had moderate knowledge, 6 (6%) staff nurses had good knowledge and none of them had excellent knowledge on therapeutic foot massage. Area-wise analysis of Knowledge of staff nurses regarding therapeutic foot massage shows that overall knowledge mean was 8.87 with standard deviation of 2.801 and mean percentage was 39.62. Further, there was no association of knowledge scores with selected demographic variables. The variables namely age, gender, educational qualification, years of experience, previous knowledge and source of information at 0.05 level of significance, do not show any significant association. The study concluded that majority of staff nurses had lack of knowledge regarding therapeutic foot massage. Hence there is a need to improve knowledge of the nurses regarding therapeutic foot massage.