Background: Wound care is one of the significant nursing responsibilities that requires excellent skills and knowledge to minimize complications, such as infection, an amputation, or, in severe cases, even death. Effective wound dressing promotes wound healing, minimize hospitalization and saving costs. Objective: This scoping review aimed to provide an overview of the knowledge, practices, and attitude regarding wound dressing among nurses who responsible for wound dressing in PHC, hospitals and clinical setting.Methodology: CINHAL, PubMed, MEDLINE, ProQuest, Cochrane Library, and Science Direct databases were searched to cover published research in the period between 2015 to 2020. 15 articles out of 3153 were analysed. The following searching terms were used: nurse's knowledge (or / and)/nurse's practice AND wound dressing OR wound care OR wound management AND primary health care center OR hospitals OR clinical setting OR healthcare facility.
Results:The majority of the articles demonstrate that the nurse's knowledge regarding wound dressing was insufficient in various domains. The results may explain the unsatisfactory level of nurse's practice in wound dressing by most nurses. The finding also recommends that updating nurses' knowledge by frequent wound management courses and clinical training has a positive effect on safe wound dressing practice.
Conclusion:There were insufficient wound dressing practices among the registered nurses, although the majority of the nurses enrolled in studies who had clinical experience and attended training programs. In addition, the unsatisfaction of clinical practice of wound management and the reasons that most of the participants are not performing standard dressing protocols are due to significant barriers for practicing the proper technique of wound dressing such as time-consuming procedure, heavy workload, lack of adequate staff to assist in dressing procedure and lack of sufficient supplies. Therefore, further research required more attention to identify and implement effective strategies to enhance health professional knowledge regarding wound dressing management.