ABSTRACT
Nursing workforce accounts for about 59 percent of health care professionals. Various benefits and barriers associated accrue to the organisations and individuals by investing in nursing. The barriers in investing in nursing include lack of resources, non-cooperation from the management and other health care professionals and lack of quality education. The main objective of the study was to assess the knowledge and attitude of staff nurses regarding the perceived benefits and barriers regarding investing in nursing and correlating them followed by administration of information handout on techniques to improve the delivery by nursing workforce. A quantitative approach, with non-experimental correlational descriptive design was adopted. A sample of 100 staff nurses were selected in selected hospitals through convenient sampling method. The tool used was a structured questionnaire to assess the knowledge and a 4-point Likert scale to assess attitude and perceived barriers and the tool was found to be reliable. The study showed that majority of the staff nurses were 26-30 years old, and female. Most of them were graduates and were working in general and surgical wards with 1-6 years of experience and having re- ceived awards/appreciation at their work place. Majority of them had average knowledge (63%) and positive attitude (68%). The correlation was 0.3 which is weak positive correlation. The most perceived benefit was organisational benefit with a modified mean, and barrier was reluctance of organisation to solve the staff shortage issues by the management. The most perceived benefit was organisational benefit with a modified mean of 0.9. There was no significant association between attitude and demographic variables but there was significant association of knowledge with age and gender. Based on the above, an information handout was developed and adminis- tered which outlined few techniques to improve delivery of services by nursing workforce.