Compliance with burns treatment protocol by nurses at Kabwe central hospital, Kabwe, Zambia.
Annually, burns result in more than 7.1 million injuries and more than 250,000 deaths worldwide, with the vast majority being in low and middle income countries. In Zambia, at Kabwe Central Hospital, burn trauma is one of the commonest causes of trauma admissions in surgical wards. To mitigate the trend, MoH in 2016 distributed infection prevention and control guidelines and burns Treatment Protocols and emphasized on the need to manage all patients with burns in accordance with national guidelines. Despite availability of guidelines, the institution is still recording unacceptably high burns (54%) infection rates. The main objective of this study was to assess the level of Compliance with Burns Treatment Protocol by nurses in Burns units at Kabwe Central Hospital. A descriptive analytical cross sectional study design was used in the study. A self-administered questionnaire was used to obtain data from 60 nurses while 55 nurses were observed using an observational checklist. Convenient sampling was used to recruit nurses for the study. SPSS version 23.0 was used for data analysis. Fisher’s exact test was used for analysis to determine the association between study variables. Level of significance was set at 5%. Findings showed that observed compliance to burns treatment protocol was very low and stood at 51%. This was despite high knowledge (100%), good management support (81.7%) and positive attitudes (100%) expressed by the majority nurses. This can be attributed to rare availability of most medical surgical supplies as reported by 78.3% of the respondents at the institution. Based on the findings the study recommend the need for the hospital to improve on the supply of resources to the burns units as most nurses reported resource inadequacy in the management of burns. There is also need of an ideal burns unit. Key words: Compliance, burn treatment protocol, nurse, knowledge, practices, resources.
Wound Care., Burns--Treatment Protocol., Burns and scalds., Wounds and injuries--Treatment., Burns.
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