Nurses' attitude and barrier toward of performing physical assessment in medical and surgical wards

Abstract

Background: Physical Assessment is essential in identifying the actual and potential patient problems and evaluating patient response to care. previous studies on the use of physical assessment in a clinical setting found that there are skills sometimes used, and some rarely or never used in the practice which reveals evidence of practice gap. Improper patient assessment rose the concern about the actual nursing practice which fail to recognize patient deterioration. Method: A quantitative descriptive correlation cross-sectional design of 253 nurses recruited from five hospitals in Al Madinah Al Munawarah in Saudi Arabia is used to study the relationship between the nurses' attitudes and the barriers to perform physical assessment and understand the influence of the participants' demographic data on the physical assessment practices. Finding: There was an agreement that physical assessment is an integral part of nursing care and around half of them showed a positive attitude toward performing the physical assessment. There was a positive significant association between attitude and perceived barriers of self-confidence, time limitation during the shift, and reliance on others and technology.