Factors Influencing Documentation of Patient's Fluid Intake and Output Among Nurses in Specialist Hospitals of Ondo State, Nigeria

Fluid intake and output documentation is important for safe, effective, ethical nursing care and accountability. Anecdotal clinical experience has shown that fluid intake and output documentation is frequently poorly adhered to by nurses leading to poor quality of care with accompanying litigation and professionals conflict. This study assessed the factors influencing documentation of patient’s fluid intake and output among nurses in Specialist Hospital of Ondo State. The study was carried out at Specialist Hospital, Okitipupa and Ikare respectively. Descriptive cross-sectional design was utilized. Sample size was 64 respondents using total enumeration. Self-structured questionnaire was used to collect data. Face validity of the instrument was ascertained by experts of Adult Health Nursing while reliability was ascertained through pretest with Cronbach alpha coefficient value of 0.70 and 0.72. Research questions were answered using descriptive statistics of mean and percentages. Findings revealed the perception was favourable (54.7%), but this does not translate to practice, factors identified to influence fluid documentation are Supervision 98.4%, Shortage of nursing staff 95.3%, Time management 90.6%, In-Service training 90.4%, Workload 82.4%, and Delegation of duty 64.1%. In conclusion, fluid intake and output documentation practice was very poor among the nurses and several factors had been identified. In other to enhance the practice, Continuing Nursing Educational Unit in each hospital should organize regular seminar in other for them to stimulate nurses to change attitude positively towards documentation of fluid intake and output.

Keywords: Factors, Fluid Intake and Output, Documentation, Output,