An Educational Intervention To Increase Nurses' Knowledge And Documentation Compliance With Femoral Puncture Post-Procedure Assessments: A Quality Improvement Project
Abstract
Post-procedural complications remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality following cardiac catheterization and cerebral angiograms using femoral punctures. Life-threatening complications can be missed due to insufficient knowledge, resulting in a patient’s death. Appropriate post-procedure assessment is required and audited by the certification body, Det Norske Veritas (DNV). Failure to perform assessments can affect a hospitals’ accreditation.
This study aimed to determine whether an educational intervention could increase documentation compliance with post-procedural assessments on a medical-surgical/COVID unit with a documentation compliance rate of zero. Previous research indicates that educational interventions can lead to minor to significant increases in healthcare professionals' knowledge and documentation compliance.
This quality improvement project used a pre-post design to assess if there was an increase in nurses’ knowledge and documentation compliance for post-proceduralassessments. The proportion of charts with documentation compliance was significantly higher following the intervention than before the intervention (Fisher's exact test, alpha = 0.05, p = 0.003).
The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to determine if there was a significant increase in the nurses' knowledge of post-procedure assessments following the intervention. The median pre-intervention score was 4.50, and the median post-intervention score was 9.00 (p < 0.001), suggesting the difference in scores is not due to chance.