Abstract:
The project aims at development of nursing activity recording form for manual computer entry and computer program for the processing of the nursing activities data. Designed outputs are informatics in terms of hours of nursing workload and hours of nursing care that individual patient received. Development processes are divided into development of nursing activity recording form and development of computer program. Steps in both development pecesses include designing, try-out and evaluation. The nursing activity recording form was designed to be a part of patient’s record. Required data composted of patients and nurses identification, type, date-hour and duration of nursing activity delivered. Data should be recorded by nurses right after the care was given and enter to the computer after the patient was discharged. The computer program designed was named the CU-NURSE program and designed to use on the Microsoft Access 95. The data entry forms are pre-defined spread sheet. Information are retrieved through DOS and/or menu-driven system. Fourteen staff nurses from an orthopedic ward in a medical center in Bangkok are try-out samples of the recording form. After one month of try-out, the samples were asked to answer the rating scale questionnaire regarding using of the recording form. Findings reveal that an average number of recording form that an individual sample used to use is 36 cases. The majority of samples earned bachelor degree or higher. They agree with the format and the method of recoding of the form. But degree of agreement on the using of records for some patients is higher than the using for all patients. Fifty-four nurse administrators were randomly sampled from 8 government and private hospitals to test the program and answer the rating scale questionnaire. Fifty-two completed questionnaire or 96.3 percent were obtained. The samples agreed in high degree with usefulness of all items of informatics derived from the program. Similarly, they agree with the usability of the program, especially the value for nursing administration. The try-out of recording form and the program were performed independently. The operation of the whole system may face some counstraint. Therefore, the try-out should be conducted for further investigation and prevention of problems. Expansion of sample size is also suggested.