Abstract:
The study assessed the preoperative preparation of patients for elective surgery among nurses at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Ituku-Ozalla, Enugu. Cross sectional survey design was adopted. Data was collected from 241 nurses who met the inclusion criteria from the surgical wards and theatre of the institution using a researcher developed questionnaire with reliability co-efficient of 0.8.Data was analyzed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 20. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies, percentages, mean, and standard deviation was used. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for the hypotheses testing. P-value of less than 0.5 is statistically at significant level. The finding of the study showed that almost all percentage the physical preoperative preparation was done by the nurses for patients booked for surgery. A good figure of nurses perform all the psychological preoperative preparation of patients for elective surgery .Most percentage of the nurses perform the spiritual preparation of patients e.g respect the religion of the patients eg time of prayers for Roman Catholic, Muslims etc. and encourage patients to participate in ward prayers but they do not read passages from the bible for the patients preoperatively and do not call a priest or clergy for the patient when requested. Most of the sociocultural preoperative preparations of patients for elective surgery were done by the nurses, but the one not done is arranging for language assistance for patients with language difficulty. There is a significant association between the nurses preoperative preparation of patients for elective surgery and their education/training .P-value of F statistics are lesser than 0.05 at the level of significance for all items tested. This implies that with nurse’s higher professional education/training, preoperative preparation of patients for elective surgery is increased. There is no significant association between the nurses preoperative preparation of patients for elective surgery and their years of experience. P-value of F- statistics are greater than 0.05 level of significance for almost all the items tested, which implies that with nurses increased years of experience ,preoperative preparation of patients is not done better and more often. Recommendations were made that, management should employ more nurses and sponsor nurses to seminar and workshops to acquire appropriate knowledge, nurses should develop themselves to increase their knowledge and skill of preparing patients and that doctors should admit patients a day or two days before surgery to create time for preoperative preparation of patients.
