A time study on measuring and recording of blood pressure in selected wards of a tertiary care hospital of North India

Vol. 1 No. 3

Year: 2011

Issue: Aug-Oct

Title: A time study on measuring and recording of blood pressure in selected wards of a tertiary care hospital of North India 

Author Name: Jogindra Vati, Masih Dayal 

Synopsis: 

The blood pressure (BP) measurement and recording is one of the many nursing activities performed by nurses. Mostly conventional non-invasive auscultatory method is used in measuring blood pressure that is an indirect measurement of arterial pressure. Nurses spend a large quantum of time of duty hours on this procedure. Despite the time spent by nurses for different nursing activities documented in the literature, but empirical evidence on time study specifically on blood pressure measurement is lacking in Indian scenario. Hence an attempt was made to estimate the time taken in measuring and recording the blood pressure. Fifty operational nurses were selected conveniently from 13 randomly selected wards of a tertiary care hospital. A total 250 observations (five on each subject) were made during morning, evening and night hours with the help of pretested electronic stopwatch. The data revealed that to carry out all steps of the procedure, the average time taken by a nurse was132.4 seconds (2.2 minutes). On the average they spent 6 seconds (range 5.4-6.45 seconds) to assemble the articles either from nursing station or from one patient to another and 1-2.1 seconds in explaining the procedure to the patient. Whereas in carrying out the actual procedure that comprised of fifteen steps, they took an average of 115.3 seconds and 9.73 seconds to record the readings in the nurses document sheet. The nurses working in special wards took more time than the nurses working in medical wards.