Developing Nursing Care Standards for Postoperative Gastrointestinal Patients

Abstract

Background: The postoperative arena is a unique environment that includes many challenging variables: complex clinical care performed by teams; high cost, sophisticated technologies that often do not interoperate; and a large array of supplies, instruments, and implants that are difficult to manage. Study aim: to develop a standard of nursing care for postoperative gastrointestinal patients. The study setting: was conducted at three postoperative gastrointestinal wards in the Gastro-Enterology Center at Mansoura University Hospitals. The subject: consisted of 90 juries, and 70 nurses working at the postoperative gastrointestinal care wards. The study tools:  were two juries’ opinionnaire and two observation checklists. The results: indicated that the observation checklist entailing nursing care for postoperative gastrointestinal patients was valid through full acceptance by juries. The checklist entailing structure items of postoperative gastrointestinal units was also validated by experts' consensus. Application of the checklist showed that the performance of bachelor nurses was higher than that diploma nurses. The reliability was tested through verifying internal consistency using the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and showed high reliability of the tool. All items of the initial checklist of nursing care for postoperative gastroenterology patients and an initial checklist of structure items were used in developing the nursing care standard for postoperative gastroenterology patients, which was also validated by experts. Conclusion and Recommendations: The developed standard for postoperative gastrointestinal patients is recommended to be applied at postoperative gastrointestinal units. Nurses working at postoperative gastrointestinal units should have a copy of the developed standards in Arabic and English languages.

Keywords: Nursing care standard, postoperative gastrointestinal

DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/59-09