Deep breathing exercise education receiving and performing status of patients undergoing abdominal surgery

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to explore deep breathing exercise education receiving and performing status of patients undergoing abdominal surgery and the relation between them. METHODOLOGY: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted at the surgical ward of a university hospital with 130 patients between August 17 and October 15, 2015. A patient information form and a deep breathing exercise questionnaire were used for data collection. The patients were visited in their rooms after their surgeries and were asked to answer these questions through face-to-face interviews. Descriptive statistics, the Mann–Whitney U test, Spearman’s correlation, and Pearson’s Chi-squared test were used for analyzing the data. RESULTS: Of the patients, 56.2% of the patients received education about deep breathing exercises, and 51.5% of them performed it. A total of 60.3% of the patients received their education from nursing students. Furthermore, 54.8% of them received this education after surgery. A strong correlation was found between the status of receiving education and performing statuses of patients (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: The study results indicated that the surgical patients did not receive adequate education about deep breathing exercises and most of them received this education after their surgeries. As a good finding, receiving education affected patients’ exercise performing statuses positively. It is advised from this study that clinical nurses should receive in-service education on the importance of pre-operative deep breathing exercise education to improve the exercise application rate among surgical patients.