Abstract
Introduction: Communication and documentation of nursing care were often difficult to perform by nurses who work in the community setting particularly in developing countries. This was due to the time constraint to write up the documentation, nurses’ high workload, a variety of nurses’ educational background and ability to write nursing documentation. The “NursBox” application was developed as an integrated media for nurses’ communication and nursing care documentation.By using this App, nurses can share their work and experience with their fellow nurses and document the nursing care electronically. The purpose of this feasibility study was to explore and identify the feasibility of the “NursBox” usage by nurses in the community health centre.
Theory/Methods: This study used mixed concurrent embedded methods. The qualitative stage focused on nurses’ experience when using the “NursBox”. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 18 nurses in Sumedang Regency, Indonesia. The quantitative stage of this study focused on the output of the nursing care documentation using the app with a total of 26 documents recorded during one week period. The documents were examined against the nursing care documentation standards from the Indonesian Ministry of Health. Content analysis and descriptive statistic were used to analyse the qualitative and quantitative data respectively.
Results: The results of the qualitative stage showed that the documentation of nursing care using the “NursBox” was easy and fast. It also could help nurses to perform the nursing care documentation in the community setting. For the quantitative stage, it was shown that there was a significant difference in the output of “NursBox” usage in terms of the completeness of nursing care documentation, nurses’ participation in documenting the care, the variety of documents that were made.
Discussions: Documentation of nursing care using the “NursBox” application is feasible to do by nurses because it is efficient in terms of time and utilization. However, there were some challenges that hindered the usage of the smartphone application by nurses which were incompatibility of the smartphone to download the app, limited internet signal in some rural areas in Indonesia, and limited database of the nursing care option.
Conclusions: The documentation of nursing care using the “NursBox” was easy and fast. The app also improves the participation rate of nurses in documenting the care and also increases the completeness of nursing documentation.
Lessons learned: Technology can be used to enhance documentation of nurse’ activities which can be used to improve the care coordination for people in the community.
Limitations: In this feasibility study, the focus is only for one feature of the app. There are three more features that can be utilised and explored to improve the care coordination among nurses and other health professions in the community setting.
Suggestions for future research: Further research is needed to improve the app performance and compatibility, provide an online and offline mode to overcome the signal problems and identify the most prevalent nursing problems in the community that can be added into the database.