Nurses and midwives who have effective roles and responsibilities in family planning and emergency contraception services which prevents many risks of women's life are of vital position. Descriptive study was planned to determine knowledge of nurses and midwives relating emergency contraception.
Population consisted of 81 volunteer midwives and 36 nurses who accepted to participate to study and, already employed at 16 Health Center and 3 Material Child Health and Family Planning Centers of Bornova Health District of ‹zmir metropolitan Area. The study group covered whole population. Data were gathered by a questionnaire form which was developed by the researchers and implemented between the dates 01.12.2002 and 02.02.2003. questionnaire form covered 30 questions; nine of them, reflected socio-demographic characteristics of nurses and midwives, five questions were related to find out their views and consulting experiences on emergency contraception and other 17 questions were organised in right and wrong answer choiced construct in order to asses their level of knowledge on emergency contraception. Level of knowledge was assessed by counting overall right answers for all questions by giving one point for each right answer. Overall right answers (17) reflected 100% level of knowledge. Mean age was 33.80±6.42, mean duration of employment was 10.26±6.44 years for nurses and midwives, 35.9 percent of them had high school level of nursing education, 57.3 % of them had associate degree level of nursing education and only 6.8 percent of them had a university degree. Only 49.6% of them, could describe emergency contraception correctly as “pregnancy prevention method initiated after unprotected sexual intercourse”, 41.9% of them reported that they met some women who sought advice about emergency contraception in health center, but 26.5% of them referred those individuals to physicians with any nursing interventions. 60.7% of them evaluated themselves as having insufficient knowledge on emergency contraception. While only 29.9% of them had in service education on emergency contraception, 59.8% of them wished to not get in service education and this results showed that nurses and midwives were not well motivated about their roles on emergency contraception. Mean score of knowledge level was found to be 11.0 and this score reflected 64.7% level of knowledge. No statistical differences were found between mean score of knowledge level and age groups and education level of nurses and midwives (P>0.05). Consequently the results indicated low level of knowledge and skills and insufficient motivation of nurses and midwives on emergency contraception.