Monitoring intensive care nurses' open endotracheal aspiration applications and investigation of the effect of error-focused short periodical informing on application

This study was conducted to determine the deficiencies and errors of intensive care nurses in the application of open endotracheal aspiration and to demonstrate the effect of brief informing presentations to correct these errors and to overcome these deficiencies on application. In this intervention study, nurses working in Adnan Menderes University Application and Research Hospital adult intensive care units, the nurses graduated from nursing department and the nurses willing to participate in the study were involved. Using power analysis, the number of samples was determined as 35, and the study was conducted with 101 intensive care nurses. The data of the study were collected by the "Participant Information Form" aiming to determine the demographic characteristics of intensive care nurses and the "Structured Form" aiming to evaluate the open endotracheal aspiration applications of the nurses. The data were obtained by two observers through unaware observation. The data were collected in two stages. In the first stage, observers filled out the forms by observing the nurses while applying the aspiration procedure. As a result of the observation, the incomplete and incorrect applications of the nurses were determined and the training of "open endotracheal aspiration of artificial airways" was carried out to correct them. In the second stage, observers filled up the same forms by observing the nurses while applying the aspiration procedure. In the evaluation of the data, number and percentage distributions, mean ± standard deviation (SD), Kolmogorov-Simirnow test, Chi-square Test for Dependent Groups (Mc-Nemar test), Paired Samples T test, Wilcoxon test, Independent Samples T Test and One Way Analysis of Variance (One Way ANOVA) were used. Of the nurses participating in the study, 77.2% were in the age range of 20-30 years, 93.1% of them were women and 46.5% were graduated from health vocational high school, in addition, 67.3% of them were nursing for 1-5 years, and 74.3% of them were composed of nurses working in intensive care unit for 1-5 years. Participants' aspiration application was determined to have a significant improvement in the mean of the total scores and in the mean total score of 16 out of 29 observable steps of the aspiration procedure. It was determined that there was no statistical correlation between the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants and the mean scores of aspiration procedure. These results demonstrate that the brief informing presentations aimed at the correction of deficiencies and errors in open endotracheal aspiration application is effective in making the applications more accurate. Key words: Education effect, endotracheal aspiration, application, intensive care nurses