Nurses’ nutritional care practice and associated factors for hospitalized surgical patients; the case of referral hospitals in Bahir Dar City, Ethiopia

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The prevalence of malnutrition in hospitalized patients continues to be high across countries, including Ethiopia. Although Nurses have key role to provide nutritional care, their practice is unknown in Ethiopia. OBJECTIVE: we aimed to assess nurses' nutritional care practice and associated factors for hospitalized surgical patients in Bahir Dar city. METHODS: An institution based cross-sectional study was conducted among 422 nurses in Bahir Dar City referral hospitals from February 1 to March 1/ 2023. Participants were selected by trained data collectors using simple random sampling. Data was collected using structured, self-administered and pre-tested tool and entered into Epi-info 7 & exported to SPSS version 23 for analysis. Multiple binary logistic regression used to identify factors and p-value of < 0.05 used to determine significant association with 95% CI odds ratio. RESULT: In this study, 410 of 422 nurses were participated. Overall, 143 (35%) 95% CI: 30.5, 39.8) of nurses had good practice on the nutritional care. Female nurses (AOR = 2.69, 95% CI, 1.62, 4.44), nutrition guidelines (AOR = 2.59, 95% CI, 1.52, 4.39), physician order (AOR = 1.82 95% CI, 1.11, 3.00), experience sharing with peers (AOR = 1.74, 95%CI 1.05, 2.87) nurse to patient ratio < 1:5 (AOR = 1.75, 95%CI, 1.01, 3.02), were positively associated with their practice. But, poor knowledge (AOR = 0.50, 95%CI, 0.30, 0.83), and unfavorable attitude (AOR = 0.51 95%CI, 0.30, 0.84) were negatively associated with their practice. CONCLUSION: The practice of nurses in nutritional care was low. Gender, access to nutritional information sources, physician orders, nurses to patient ratio, knowledge, and attitude of nurses were factors associated with their practice. Therefore; training, guideline access, experience sharing, and increasing nursing staff is crucial to provide optimal nutritional care for hospitalized patients.