Nursing care before and after thyroidectomy with implementation of evidence based nursing guidelines to care for patients is very crucial for preventing postoperative complications and improve their health outcomes. Aim: This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an evidence based nursing guidelines on thyroidectomy patients’ health outcomes at General Surgery departments. Research design: A Quasi –experimental research design was conducted to achieve the aim of this study. Subjects: A purposive sample of 80 adult patients of both sexes who they admitted within 9 months in the General Surgical departments at Benha University Hospital , scheduled for thyroidectomy surgeries and accepted to participate in this study .Tools for data collection: three tools were used in this study: 1-Structured questionnaire assessment 2- Patients Practical observational checklist 3- Patients’ health outcomes assessment. Results : of present study show that , the majority of the studied patients have poor knowledge regarding thyroid disease , thyroidectomy diet , medication and exercise care and all the studied patient had incompetent level of practice pre implementing evidence based guidelines, while the majority of them have good level of knowledge , and three quarters of them had competent level of practice post of evidence based nursing guidelines implementation . There was a positive correlations between patient practice with neck pain and disability Index pre and post applying of evidence based nursing guidelines Conclusion: Based on the results of the current study, the study pointed out that, applied of evidence based nursing guidelines for thyroidectomy patients had improved patients' health outcomes through significantly increased level of knowledge and practice scores, and decreased overall postoperative complications rate. Recommendations: 1-Designed evidence-based thyroidectomy nursing guidelines booklet covering all perioperative care for thyroidectomy should be distributed at the surgical departmen.2- Period of follow up after thyroidectomy need to be longer than 1month, it is suggested to be 6-12 month, to monitor hypothyroidism and permanent hypocalcaemia. |
