Development of Standard of Care for Pulmonary Tuberculosis for Nurses Working in Chest Outpatient Clinics

Tuberculosis: (TB) is considered the second worldwide fatal disease. It is among the top ten causes of death in the world. In Egypt, TB is the third most important public health problem. The aim of the present study is to develop nursing standard of care for pulmonary TB patients in chest outpatients clinics. This study was carried out at the chest out-patient clinics in Mansoura District, Dakahlia Governorate from March 2009 to January 2010. The subjects of the study included all nurses (70) who were working in the different chest outpatient clinics during the study, and 14 academic nurses and medical experts for testing the validity of the developed standard.Two tools were developed by the researcher for data collection. Tool one is an observation checklist used to determine the performance of nurses providing care to pulmonary TB patients while the second tool referred to the Pulmonary TB nursing standards an opinionaire sheet. Study results revealed that the great majority of experts agreed about the structure and process standards More than half of the nurses had an age average ranging between 36 to 46 years old with the majority having a nursing diploma. As regards, the nurses performance, more than one-third of the nurses performed the overall nursing care for the patients (assessment of patients and contact, planning, implementation, health education and evaluation).In conclusion most of the nurses did not perform nursing care plans because there was no structure standard although there is a guideline for the nursing management of pulmonary tuberculosis patients. Therefore nurses need to develop standards. The developed standard will be given to the chest dispensary nurses after translation into Arabic as a reference guide to implement ideal care of TB patients.