Nurses’ knowledge, practice and confidence about wound care based on the competency standards in 8 hospitals in Vietnam

Background: Wound Care (WC) plays a crucial role in patient care conducted by nurses. It directly affects treatment outcomes, especially when chronic or infected wounds remain a big challenge for WC specialists and requires huge medical recourses in wound care and treatment. Objectives: This research aimed to explore the actual situation of WC conducted by nurses to inform the development of a training program based on the Vietnam's Basic Nursing Competency Standards (VNBNCS). Settings: Eight hospitals in Vietnam. Participants: 518 nurses directly performing WC. Design: Descriptive cross-sectional study. Methods: The study was implemented from June 2020 to October 2020, and the research indicators are nurses' mean knowledge, practice, and confidence scores. The data collection tools included: 1) a self-administered questionnaire about nurses' general characteristics (4 items) and WC knowledge (48 items), a WC evaluation checklist (16 items), and a self-administered questionnaire about their confidence in performing WC (12 items). Data were entered using EpiData 3.1 and analyzed with SPSS 16.0. A p<0.05 was the level of significance. Results: The highest knowledge score of 1.67 ± 0.47 points was found in the item on clean WC. The highest practice score of 8.79 ± 1.20 points belonged to the item on in strict compliance with disinfection principles, compared to the lowest one of 7.58 ± 1.94 points found in the item on observing the patient's post-WC reactions, such as pain and bleeding. Nurses who felt very confident in their bandage replacement skills formed 21.2% (110/518 nurses). Conclusion: Nurses had high mean knowledge and practice scores in all items, and nurses who were confident and highly confident in performing WC accounted for more than 50%.