Nursing Team Training to Use a Flowchart to Care for Patients with Chest Pain

Abstract

Background: chest pain, of multicausal etiology, associated with a cardiac cause or not, is one of the most frequently presented symptoms by patients in Emergency Care Units. Despite its high prevalence in health services, there is still a deficiency in care standardization, which raises difficulties in acute coronary syndrome diagnosis and delay in treatment. The objective was to assess the efficiency of professional training of nursing teams in Emergency Care Units on the use of a flowchart to care for patients with chest pain.
 Methods and Findings: this educational intervention study was conducted with 25 nursing team professionals. It has been developed in four steps: Step 1 referred to prior application of the validated research instrument. Step 2 comprised training to use the flowchart with an expository lesson on care of patients with chest pain and guidance regarding the flowchart to be implemented. Step 3 reapplied the validated instrument after class. Step 4 reapplied the instrument after 2 months of training for flowchart implementation. When comparing the results of the instrument applied to nursing team professionals, post-training and follow-up performance surpassed that of pre-training. It was observed that professionals with less than five years of experience showed better performance. This study had as limitation the small sample of health professionals participating in the offered training.
 Conclusion: training was satisfactory and significant, and professionals demonstrated content assimilation, obtaining higher scores than at the beginning of the research.