Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
NURSING IN CRITICAL CARE, cilt.30, sa.2, ss.1-10, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, SSCI, Scopus)
Background: Although oral care practices are an important part of nursing care inintensive care units, it is reported that oral care practices are disrupted and not per-formed at the desired level because of various factors.Aim: This study was conducted to examine the experiences of intensive care nursesregarding oral care.Study Design: Phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research methods, wasused in the study. Seven nurses working in the intensive care units of a tertiary hospi-tal were included in the study. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews.The interviews were conducted face-to-face in a quiet room, and the interviews wereaudio-recorded with the participants' permission. After the voice recordings weretranscribed, codes, categories and themes were created. The collected data were ana-lysed using inductive content analysis. Results are presented with direct quotations.Results: Three themes were uncovered: ‘Barriers and challenges to oral care’, ‘conse-quences of ineffective oral care’ and ‘reasons for unmet/ineffective oral care’. Theparticipants had problems in practice because of patient, nurse or institutional factors.The nurses also reported that some of the difficulties they encountered during oralcare caused them fear and stress, which led to reluctance to perform oral care. Thenurses argued that when they wanted to apply oral care, they could not do sobecause of patient, time and material-related problems. In addition, the difficultiesexperienced by nurses during oral care practices were related to inadequate oral carepractices, especially during nursing education.Conclusions: The importance of oral care for intensive care patients and the impor-tance of nurses' developed self-efficacy in providing this care were revealed. In linewith the results obtained, the number of trainings on oral care practice activitiesshould be increased and the content of the trainings should be expanded.Relevance to Clinical Practice: The difficulties experienced by nurses during oral carepractices in intensive care may be caused by many factors such as patient, nurse or institutional factors. It has been stated that inadequate training causes great stress inthose who perform this practice for the first time in a complex environment such asintensive care and that the negativities experienced cause reluctance to perform thispractice. In order to effectively implement this practice that the patient needs, nursesmust first have the necessary competence. For this, nurses need to be supported within-service training after graduation