Assessing Nurses’ Perceptions towards Nursing Diagnosis in Some Variables: An Example of City Hospital

Objective: Nursing profession is a health discipline that includes theoretical knowledge and skills and requires practice. Therefore; scientific methods are used for practice in nursing profession as in every professional discipline. The method that has brought a scientific and planned approach to nursing care is nursing process. Nursing diagnosis, being the second phase of nursing process, provides a basis to nursing practices. The current study was undertaken to assess nurses’ perceptions towards nursing diagnosis in some variables. Methods: Nurses (n=265) who worked at a city hospital participated in this descriptive study voluntarily. To collect study data; Information Request Form that targeted at information on nurses’ socio-demographic characteristics and their nursing diagnosis and Perceptions of Nursing Diagnosis Survey (PNDS) were used. For the analyses of the data; numbers, percentages, means, Kruskall Wallis test, Mann Whitney U test and Spearman Correlation analysis were used. Results: It was found that nurses’ average age was 32.19±7.81, 74.7% of them were female, 58.1% of them had undergraduate academic degree and 30.9% of them worked for 6-10 years. It was identified that 93.2% of the nurses had training about nursing process, 92.5% of them found nursing process necessary and 62.6% of them had difficulty in data collection/assessment phase of nursing process. Nurses mostly diagnosed risk for infection, lack of knowledge, change in nutrition and risk for fall in their patients. Average PNDS score of the participant nurses was found to be 2.27±0.67. It was seen that there were significant differences between nurses’ gender, educational status and the clinical department where they worked and average scores of clear representation of patient situation and conceptual orientation. Conclusion: It was identified that although nurses had difficulty in every phase of the process, they had positive views of perceiving nursing diagnoses and some variables affected their perception towards nursing diagnosis. Nurses can be given on-job trainings about every phase of nursing process, particularly, about diagnosis phase.