Nursing Care Practices at Jimma University Medical Center: A Retrospective Cross - Sectional Study in Ethiopia

Nursing care is the gathering of information and prioritizing interventions before providing an appropriate cares using a specified assessment format to intervene the most common problems in Hospitals. Most of the nursing care activities were left undone or poorly assessed in Europe with further disrespect & abuse of women during institutional childbirth services in low-middle-income countries including Ethiopia. The current study focused to determine the status of nursing care practices in the obstetric ward of Jimma University medical center. Wherefore, a retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted from April 16, 2019 to May 15, 2019 with documentary analysis of 344 randomly selected medical records. A semi-structured and pretested questionnaire containing 16 items of nursing diagnoses were used to collect data, which was then analyzed by SPSS version 20 under formal consent of participants. During the process of management, frequencies & percentages were calculated and used to describe the data by tables & figures for ranking among the identified nursing cares. A total of 344 records were reviewed and analyzed by the study making 100% review rate. The study revealed all the nursing cares indicated in the domains were provided to labouring mothers with variable degrees. The most prominent nursing cares in the ward were recognized to be cares related to nausea (95.9%), fatigue (95.1%), acute pain relieve related to uterine contractions (94.8%), avoidance of imbalance nutrition due to poor intake (38.1%), bathing/toileting self-care deficit related to pain (27.6%) and constipation due hemorrhoids (24.4%). The remaining elements were practiced rarely. The care practice of labouring mothers in the study unit was not comprehensive. Therefore, the researchers recommend a compressive care approach as much as possible to the study unit and further study on the determinants of variation among the care domains.