Nursing process application in Nepal teaching hospital

Abstract

Relevance. Nursing process is a scientific method of organizing and providing nursing care. Due to imbalance of nurse patient ratio, application of nursing process in actual clinical setting is very limited which reduces the quality nursing care. Despite the importance of application of nursing process, there is no standard nursing process protocol available in the hospital where study was carried out. The governments set a standard nurse patient ratio in Nepal, UK and USA is 1:10, 1:8, and 1:5 respectively. However, global statistic has been revealed due to improper nurse patient ratio which cannot implement the nursing process for patient caring which are being for leading cause of mortality of patient in hospitals. Aim of the study. The study was conducted to assess the application of the nursing process among nurses working in teaching hospital. Additionally, this study explores the association between status of application of nursing process and selected variables. Materials and Methods. Based on a descriptive cross-sectional study design. A simple random sampling technique was applied for nurses working in tertiary hospital of Chitwan, Nepal. The data was collected using structured questionnaire among 182 nurses. The statistical analysis tool chi-square was used to find out the association and logistic bivariate to find out the odds ratio. Results and Discussion. The result indicates that only 23.1 % of nurses have moderate level of application of nursing process. Majority of nurses did not follow standard ways of nursing process. This study also explored the influencing variable for barriers related to nurses and profession. Age (p=0.001), professional qualification (p=0.001) and learning approach (p=0.022) were the significant influencing variable for barriers related to nurses whereas practical skill (p= 0.001), cooperation among nurses (p=0.008) and difficulty in diagnosis characteristic (p=0.010) were the barrier related to profession. Conclusion. It was concluded that the majority of nurses working in teaching hospital of Nepal did not follow the standard ways of nursing process so that barriers for the application of nursing process are identified. The overall ratio of nurses to patients in the teaching hospital is 1:16, that is in the lower range than the standards set by the government. Therefore, special attention must be paid to adherence to a standardized nursing process protocol for quality medical care.