Nursing Care Audit Based on Nursing Process Model and Ensuring Patient Safety among Staff Nurses

Abstract

The nursing process model involves assessing, diagnosing, planning, implementing and evaluating patient situations. In this study to audit nursing care, using a nursing process model, nursing audit checklist was designed based on nursing process model. The demographic questionnaire contained nurses’ age, gender, work experience, type of employment, education level, and work shift. Nurses’ performance was assessed using the audit checklist during a single work shift. Some indicators were assessed through a review of documents and nursing notes. Sample size was 100. The results showed that the majority of nurses (about 80%) worked in rotational shifts, 70 percent had 5 - 10 years of experience and 90 percent had GNM qualification. The rate of least compliance with nursing process indicators was 12.6, confirming that the majority of nursing care was not carried out based on the nursing process. The mean overall compliance score significantly differed between nurses with a BSc and those with GNM (p=0.04). This difference was also found in the mean compliance scores for three domains, diagnosis (p=0.001), implementation (p=0.02), and evaluation (p=0.01). In addition, the overall mean score did not significantly differ between nurses with permanent and non-permanent employment (t=0.123, p=0.42). The finding revealed that the knowledge of nurses on the nursing process is not adequate to be put into practice and high patient nurse ratio affects its application.