Nurses knowledge, Perspectives and Practice of the nursing Process in Two Public Hospitals in Kenya: an Interventional Study

Abstract

The nursing process is the foundation and organizational framework that guides professional nursing practice. Professionally, the nursing process is recognized as a model on which nursing standards are based and remains the universally accepted method of scientific nursing practice. This was a quasi-experimental study (with pre-test and post-test that was carried out from March 2013 to July 2015 in two public hospitals in Kenya. It aimed at establishing whether training of nurses on the nursing process would improve their knowledge, perspectives and practice of the nursing process in patient care. Analysis was performed by use of computer software statistical package for social scientists (SPSS version 22). Descriptive statistics was used to summarize the quantitative data while Chi square test was used to determine the whether there was significant difference between pre-test and posttest.The findings revealed significant difference (p<0.05) in knowledge of the nursing process and on the number of nurses who stated that they utilize the nursing process. However there was no significant difference (p>0.05) on the nurses perspectives towards the nursing process and the number of patients drawn for a care plan. The study concludedthat training was effective inimproving nursing process knowledge and utilizationbut not on the perspectives towards the nursing process. This therefore calls for healthcare organizations who intend to use the nursing process as model of providing quality nursing care to plan for continuous training programmes and also develop nursing audit mechanism to ensure its continued utilization and change of perspective.