Determination of Professional Behaviours among Nurses Working at a Selected Teaching Hospital in India

Abstract

Nursing is an essential component of all healthcare services, with the potential to have a significant and long-term impact on health outcomes for the world's ageing population. As their professional behaviour plays a major role in improving the quality of patient care, this study was conducted to determine the professional behaviour of nurses. A descriptive and cross-sectional study design was selected with fifty nurses working in a selected teaching hospital who were selected using convenient sampling technique. The Behavioural Inventory for Professionalism in Nursing (BIPN) was used to determine the professional behaviour of nurses. The inventory has a total possible composite score of 27. All of the items were dichotomous and questioned about the nurse's actions in the last two years. The autonomy and research were the areas where nurses receive the lowest mean ratings from the BIPN subscales. The nurse's mean scores in the areas of competence and continuous education (mean = 1.97), educational preparedness (mean = 1.87) and application of theory (mean = 1.73) were the highest with the mean total score from BIPN was 10.44± 3.55. The results showed that age, gender, nurses' role, their years of experience and educational status had a statistically significant association with professional behaviour. Hence, the ways to improve the professional behaviour among nurses to be investigated and must be supported to uplift the image of nursing and the quality of patient care.