Nursing in Bangladesh: Rhetoric and reality

In the past decade concern has been raised through independent channels that nurses in Bangladesh do not provide active hands on care directly to patients as envisioned when the British nursing model was first introduced decades ago. The objective of the study was to observe the activities nurses engaged in during their working hours on major medical and surgical wards. A total of 24,587 min of nursing activities were recorded by three observers in 18 hospitals between the hours of 05.00 and 23.00 h over a 3 month period. These were compared with reports of the nurses about their activities, and indirectly with the activities outlined in the nursing curriculum. Nurses in government hospitals spent only 5.3% of their working time in direct contact with their patients. Paperwork and indirect patient care occupied nurses for 32.4% of their time while 50.1% fell under the category of unproductive time such as time away from the ward and chatting with other nurses. Hospital support workers and patients’ relatives acted as nurse surrogates. When asked how they spent their day, nurses reported what the curriculum specifies but not what was observed. As a consequence policy decisions have not consistently reflected this reality. By contrast, nurses in the hospitals outside the government system were found to spend 22.7% directly with patients. A deeper understanding of nurse's behaviour on the wards is required to determine the desired role of the nurse that will, in turn, feed into nursing policy and decisions related to resource allocation.