Nurses’ Performance at the Family Planning Clinics in Alexandria

Everywhere it is recognized that nurses can make unique and useful contribution to family
planning by performing a variety of tasks including initial assessment of client, counseling, services
delivery, infection prevention and control, and also follow up. Good nursing performance in family
planning clinics helps individuals and couples to meet their reproductive health needs safely and
effectively. Thus, it can help for increasing family planning users and control morbidity, mortality rate
and unplanned population growth. Objective: Assess nurses' performance at Family Planning Clinics
in Alexandria. Setting: The study was conducted at 12 Family Planning Clinics; 4 Family Planning
Clinics (FP) affiliated to 4 hospitals that randomly selected one from each health agency in
Alexandria. The remaining 8 outpatient FP clinics, affiliated to Family Health centers that were
randomly selected, one from each zone in Alexandria. Subjects: All nurses (100) working at the FP
Clinics affiliated to the previously mentioned settings. Tool: Nurses’ Performance Observational
Checklist. Results: 94% of study nurses had fair score of performance in family planning clinics. The
rest (6%) & none of them had good as well as poor total score of performance respectively. Study
findings also show that, there was a statistically significant positive correlation between attending
training programs about family planning and level of nurses' performance. There was no statistically
significant correlation between total score of nurses' performances and their Socio demographic
characteristics as: age, marital status, level of education and occupation of the recruited subject.
Conclusion: In all study setting the majority of study nurses had fair total score of performance
regarding F.P clinics, while the rest 6% of the recruited nurses had good score of performance and
none of them had poor score of their performance in family planning clinics. Nurses’ performance has
positive significant relation between received training programs about family planning and their
performance in family planning clinics. Recommendations: Clear job description should be made for
nurses in family planning clinics and review regularly and update as necessary. There is an urgent
need to design periodic educational training programs to improve knowledge, skills of nurses about
family planning care as well as to improve their performance.