Nursing documentation of inpatient care in eastern Ghana

Abstract

The standard of nursing care documentation is not on a par with that in developed countries, partly owing to a lack of guidelines, as well as a persistent shortage of nurses and the limited use of nursing care records. It is recommended that nursing stakeholders use a multidisciplinary approach to develop policies/guidelines on nursing care documentation and provide training opportunities for nurses on effective documentation.

Documentation Practice and Associated Factors among Nurses in Harari Regional State and Dire Dawa Administration Governmental Hospitals, Eastern Ethiopia

“…Attaining standard training on nursing documentation was positively associated. This finding is comparable with the finding of the study conducted in Ghana (18), Uganda (5) and Gondar (1).…”

“…Ghana (18) and Jimma (17). The possible reason for this variation might be the tool utilized to determine the practice level of documentation (2, 17) self-administered questionnaire was used in those studies but medical record review for this study and this might be the fact that self-reported documentation practice may be overestimated due to social desirability bias.…”

“…Nurses play an important role in the care of patients and what they put into writing determines the standard and quality of care rendered to the patient (2). Documentation is the tip of the iceberg of patient care issues that could expose caregivers to medico-legal suits and other forms of disciplinary action (18). So letdown to document appropriately creates a great problem when it comes to the evaluation of client care (2) and is a key factor in miscommunication among nurses and physicians, delayed, repeated or omitted and fragmented care that will cause preventable medical errors which may potentially affect patient outcomes (1).…”

Implementation of the policy on standard protocol for care of septic and aseptic wounds in selected public health facilities in Ghana: an analytic case study

“…In line with findings in some of the reviewed literature, it was found that even though over two thirds of the staff demonstrated knowledge of standard policy protocols, similar to findings by [7,12,26,27], there was an incommensurate application of the knowledge in real practice of their duties.…”

“…A study conducted in ten hospitals on point prevalence of HAIs in Ghana found that out of the 2,107 inpatients surveyed, 184 HAIs were found among 172 patients, representing an overall prevalence of 8.2% with the most common HAIs being surgical site infections [3]. Similar studies on Ghana [4][5][6][7][8][9] and elsewhere [10][11] have alluded to high prevalence of HAIs related to wound infections be they septic or surgical (also referred to as aseptic wounds in this paper).…”