A Study of Nurses Practice Quality in the Stomatitis Care of Cancer Patients with Neutropenia, Hospitalized in Shahid Ghazi Tabatabaei Hospital, Tabriz, 1999-2000

Abstract

Abstract: Introduction: Cancer is one of the greatest afflicting intricate that causes high range of mortality in the world countries, without any geographic and racial borders. In advanced countries like United States of America, Cancer is the second factor of mortality after heart diseases. Our country, also is involved to this problem so that annually cancer causes death of many people. There are several treatment methods for cancer so that chemotherapy is one of the most important methods. Since chemotherapy prevents invasion of malignant tumors in the body, it has unpleasant side effects so that we can refer to stomatitis. It occurs following chemotherapy with bone-marrow suppression, decreasing defense agent and fatal complications like neutropenia, Agranulocytosis and thrombocytopenia. It prepares patients to involve sever pyogenic infections and results in fatal septicemia and pneumonia. Because, stomatitis is prevented and controlled by subtle and continued oral care, the oncology nurse has important role in decreasing complications and hospital care expenditures by careful assessment, investigation and continued patient education. The importance of stomatitis has prompted researcher to study quality of nurse’s practice in the stomatitis care of cancer patients with neutropenia at this center. Method & Materials: This survey is one descriptive study. Data collection instrument was one questionnaire. In this survey, all 16 nurses of medical department of Shahid Ghazi Tabatabaei Hospital participated so that their practice in the stomatitis care of cancer patients with neutropenia studied 112 times, in morning, evening and night shifts totally and then their checklists were filed. Results & Discussion: Study of results in this survey indicates that the most of nurses (90.1%) had low grade and weak practice in oral care of cancer patients with neutropenia and according to the care standards and Oral Assessment Guide (OAG), they had weakly investigated stomatitis in oral assessment, oral care and patient education levels. Since one of the oncology nurses duties in management of cancer patient is oral care and they must investigated it carefully, low oral management and weak investigation results in irreparable complications and high expenditures for patient and hospital, therefore, researcher suggests that this problem will be solved by clinical nurses training, creating instructional courses, correcting nursing management, subtle nursing planning, using sufficient and experienced personnel, increasing treatment equipment’s and performing sufficient and comparative researches in the other hospitals.