Nurses performance toward pre and postoperative psychosocial interventions for patients in hospitals, Sana’a city, Yemen

Background: It seems that the nurse is an important contact who provides care, information, and support, and also coordinates the patients’ care before and after surgery, which may reducing the patients’ feelings of insecurity and fear. Aim: to assess the performance level of nurses working in the general surgical wards at selected hospitals in Yemen about psycho-social interventions for pre and post-operative patients and find out the association factors between demographic characteristics and performance. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out in surgical wards of 6 hospitals in Sana’a city, Yemen. A self-administered questionnaire including 45 pre-postoperative psychosocial interventions was distributed to all general abdominal surgical nurses and collected between December 2014 and February 2015. The results were entered, analyzed and tabulated using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 19. Results: Out of 130 nurses, 88.2% of respondents had a moderate level of performance on pre-postoperative psychosocial interventions. Concerning each sub-dimension, the psychosocial, communication and spiritual performance were at a moderate level also, information provision performance was at moderate level and psycho-education were at low level. It is indicated that problems lacked performance regarding PSI in general and particular on psycho-education area among surgical nurses in Yemen. Yemeni surgical nurses were shown to be associated with better performance scores regarding psychosocial. Surgical nurses working in army and non-teaching hospitals were shown to be associated with better performance scores regarding psycho-education. Conclusion: Performance of pre postoperative PSI is moderate level among nurses working in surgical wards.