Comparative research of autism related university studies and family care plans of hungarian health visitor students

Dóra Varga¹, Noémi Sulyok², *Helga Judit Feith³, Zsuzsanna Soósné Kiss⁴, Eszter Sajó⁵, Zsuzsa Várnai⁵, István Vingender³

Summary
Aim. The number of autistic children has been increasing in the last few decades. The aims of our surveys were to examine the university studies about autism and explore future caring plans based on the acquired knowledge of the Hungarian health visitor students.
Material and methods. Full-time health visitor students were involved in our quantitative research in Hungary. The participants were students of BSc level medical education in Budapest, Miskolc and Szeged. 131 people gave valuable answers (total response rate: 74.8%).
Results. 63.8% of the health visitor students have received some information about autism during their training programme, but only 8% of them considered this information to be detailed. 24.2% of the students of Semmelweis University, 16.2% of the University of Szeged and none of the health visitor students from Miskolc – for that matter incorrectly- reckoned autism as developmental disorder (p = 0.003). Only 20.0% of the respondents thought, they can get in adequate contact with autistic children according to their current knowledge, but 54.9% of them weren’t sure about it.
Conclusions. We can conclude that the majority of health visitor students do not have sufficient knowledge of autism which may reduce the quality of their work in the future. Therefore (future) health visitors must be given the opportunity to get detailed information on this topic, during the training programmes of BSc and after graduation.

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