Effectiveness of Protocol-Based Postoperative Nursing Care among Post-Abdominal Surgery Patients

To find out the Effectiveness of protocol-based postoperative Nursing care among postabdominal surgery patients of selected hospitals at Mangalore

An evaluatory research approach with Quasi experimental, post-test only control group design was used for this study. Formal written permission was obtained from the authorities to conduct the study. Forty post abdominal surgery patients, who met the inclusion criteria, were selected from the hospital by purposive sampling technique. Outcome assessment was conducted among Group I using outcome assessment tool. The same tool was used to assess the outcome in Group II, 7 days after administration of post operative nursing care protocol. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics

The demographic data revealed that most of the subjects (60%) in Group I comes under the age group of 25 -50 years, in Group II 40% of subjects comes under the age group of below 25 years and 25–50 years each. It also shows that more than half of the subjects in Group I (55%) and Group II (65%) are female, in Group I (65%) and Group II (75%) underwent abdominal surgery under general anesthesia and more than half of the subjects in Group I (60%) and Group II (60%) underwent elective surgery. The study showed that the mean outcome score of Group I (9.35) is higher than that of Group II (6.05). The association between outcome score and demographic variables like age, gender, type of anesthesia, type of surgery of Group I and Group II were not significant at 0.05 levels.

The study showed that the outcome score of post abdominal surgery patients who received protocol based post operative nursing care is relatively lower than that of post abdominal surgery patients who received routine post operative nursing care. Hence it was concluded that protocol based post operative nursing care is effective in reducing the outcome score in terms of occurrence of selected post operative complications, duration of post anesthetic care unit stay and pain level of post abdominal surgery patients.