Nurses Performance at Operating Room at El-Miniya University Hospitals

Background: Operating room is a very critical area, and the number of patients undergoing surgical operation keeps growing, and maybe exposed to numerous risks. So the nurses working in operating room unit must be responsible and highly competent to meet the demands of their profession. Aim: To assess the performance of the operating room nurses at EL-Miniya University Hospitals. Subject and Methods: Data were collected by using Egyptian M.O.H observation 2 checklists. Sample: The current study was including three samples: - The sample was including all the circulating staff nurses caring for patients in preoperative, intraoperative, and post-operative phase. They were 30 nurses working at the mentioned three areas, including (13) staff nurses in general surgery, (10) staff nurses in gynecology obstetric, and (7) staff nurses in orthopedic surgery. - The sample was including all the scrub staff nurses caring for patients’ intraoperative phase. They were 30 staff nurse working at the mentioned three areas, including (9) staff nurses in general surgery, (11) staff nurses in gynecology and obstetric, and (10) staff nurses in orthopedic surgery. -- 150 patients constituting which admitted to the hospitals during the period from (March 2013, to December 2013). Nurses were observed while they worked in OR. Each of them was observed 5 times. Nurses with a working experience less than one year was excluded from the study. The patients arriving the waiting area at 8:00Am to receive the preoperative care the work in the OR begging at 8:30Am until the cases end. Results: The current study show that the majority of the study nurses among the study were diploma nurses, (46.6%) of them have years of experience between 10-15 years working in the OR, the majority percentage of them didn’t gain training courses (65%) and (36.6%) of them working on general surgery, the circulating nurses have poor performance in pre, during, and post-operative phase and good performance for the scrub nurses. Conclusion: Circulating nurses performance was significantly relevant attainment of training courses (p=0.001), years of experience (p=0.013). The poorest circulating nurse performance was showed in post-operative phase, rather than other phases. Recommendations: The hospital should plan to teach nurses the job description for them until they know all the duties that must be carried out to patients, performance feedback about circulating and scrub nurses is critical to improve performance among OR nurses, Strict observation of nurses during work and continuous evaluation of their performance and correction of poor performance is essential, Reminder for nurses should be placed as wall chart and handout, The Infection Control committee should develop and update all relevant protocols annually so the new information becomes available for the best performance and Training of OR nurses should be conducted pre and during service about nurse s role in the OR through regular scientific meetings and training courses.