Abstract:

There has been a near absent practice of specialized diabetic foot care observed in health institutions in Rivers State, Nigeria. The study assessed the practice of diabetic foot care among 100 nurses in the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital and the Rivers State Hospitals Management Board Hospitals (which include General Hospitals from all the local government areas) in Rivers state, Nigeria before and after interventional training. A one-day hands-on training workshop on diabetic foot care, adopted from the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence (NICE), was implemented to train one hundred (100) nursing practitioners. A structured questionnaire on different aspects of diabetic foot care was interviewer-administered to the nurses and scored accordingly before and after the training. Practice of foot inspection, palpation, footwear assessment and assessment of patient’s capacity for self-care was found to be significantly low prior to training. An improvement in practice of the different aspects of diabetic foot care among the nurses after the intervention was observed. This buttresses the need for formal training of nursing practitioners on diabetic foot care for improvement of the quality of diabetes care in Rivers State, Nigeria

Keywords: Diabetes, Diabetic foot, Nurses, Rivers state.

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