OKEKE ESTHER OGOCHUKWU

is study assessed the knowledge and practice of safe handling and administration of chemotherapeutic drugs amongst nurses in tertiary health institution, Benin City. The study aims to evaluate the level of knowledge and practice in the safe handling and administration of chemotherapeutic drugs among nurses in a tertiary health institution; and to identify the perceived factors that support the practice of safe handling and administration of chemotherapeutic drugs among nurses in a tertiary health institution. Three research questions were raised and answered while two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 significance value. The study adopted the descriptive cross-sectional design and simple random sampling method was used to select 278 nurses in the University of Benin Teaching Hospital, Benin City. A well-structured questionnaire was used as instruments for data collection. The instrument was validated by the research supervisor and two other experts in the field. To ensure the reliability of the instrument, a pilot study was conducted and a reliability value greater than (>0.5) was obtained. The data collected were analysed using both descriptive (frequency, percentages, mean value) and inferential statistics (chi-square statistical test) to test the hypotheses at 0.05 significance level using International Business Machine (IBM) Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24.0. The result shows that majority of the respondents have fair level of knowledge of chemotherapeutic drugs and low level of practice of safe handling of chemotherapeutic drugs and that none of the sociodemographic characteristics was associated with level of knowledge of chemotherapeutic drugs