Understanding nursing perspective towards barriers to the optimal delivery of enteral nutrition in intensive care settings.

backgroundThe management process of Enteral Nutrition (EN) typically involves the interaction between a team of health care practitioners. Nurses being the closest to the patients, have crucial responsibilities and play a major role in feeding delivery along with other medical treatments. This study was conducted to investigate the perception of the nurses working in adult and paediatric intensive care Units (ICUs) regarding the EN barriers and identify the factors that influenced their perception.

methodsThe data in this cross-sectional study was collected via online survey between 15 October 2021 and January 2022. All nurses working in adult or paediatric ICUs across Saudi Arabia were eligible to participate. The tool used for the data collection was adapted from Cahill et al. (2016) and then reviewed and modified by the researchers. The survey collected information about the demographics of the nurses, and it included 24 potential EN barriers where the participants were asked to rate their importance on a scale from 1 to 5. Descriptive statistics were performed to describe the variables, univariant analysis were performed to compare the perceptions of the nurses regarding the EN barriers based on their characteristics followed by stepwise linear regression analysis.

resultsA total of 136 nurses working in adult and paediatric ICUs were included in this study. The results showed that the most important barriers as perceived by the nurses was "Frequent displacement of feeding tube, requiring reinsertion" [3.29 ± 1.28], "Delays in initiating motility agents in patients not tolerating enteral nutrition" [3.27 ± 1.24] and "Enteral formula not available on the unit". [3.27 ± 1.24]. Our results showed that the responses of the participants statistically varied based on their work settings, gender, region, and educational level for some items in the survey (P-value ≤ 0.05). In the regression analysis, gender was the only variable statistically influenced the total Likert rating scores of the participants (r = -0.213, p-value = 0.013).

conclusionThis study identified several barriers that exist in the nursing practice of EN in critical care settings. There are distinct differences in the perception of the nurses to these barriers based on their characteristics. Understanding such differences is important for implementing future strategies for units that needed the most help in prioritizing EN delivery.