Perception of staff nurses regarding quality audit process in hospitals of Mangalore District, Karnataka.

As in other fields, auditing in clinical nursing can go a long way in enhancing the productivity of nurses. Nursing audit is helpful in ascertaining the extent to which the organisation complies with the relevant quality norms and can involve in procedural or assessment criteria. Purposive sampling technique was used in this study which involved 255 staff nurses from two hospitals of Karnataka. The study tools included demographic proforma and audit scale (arbitrarily classified as unfavourable and favourable perception) to evaluate the impact of hospital and community-based clinical audit programme. It was shown that in selected hospitals, staff nurses had positive perception about the audit process; they also reported improvement in their levels of knowledge, skill and patient care though frequent audit hindered them in discharge of their duties.