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

This study aimed to explore deep breathing exercise education receiving and performing status of patients undergoing abdominal surgery and the relation between them.

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.

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).

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.