Background
Each year, more than a billion people suffer from respiratory diseases leading to about 4 million deaths worldwide. Airway Clearance impairment is deeply related to these diseases causing a significant impact on self-care and quality of life. Therefore, it is essential to identify clinical data, nursing diagnoses and nursing interventions, providing a solid basis for clinical reasoning and integrating the best scientific evidence to enhance nursing care. This scoping review aims to map the existing evidence on clinical data, nursing diagnoses and nursing interventions addressing nursing focus “Airway Clearance”.
Methods
A scoping review was performed according to Joanna Briggs Institute framework. We searched MEDLINE, CINAHL Complete, Scopus, Web of Science, and PEDro databases for published English, Portuguese, and Spanish literature between 1975 and 2021. It included all studies on airway clearance in adult patients in all contexts of nursing care. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies, as well as systematic reviews, were included. The PRISMA-ScR checklist was used.
Results
In total 1355 studies were identified. After removing duplicates, 104 matched the inclusion criteria and were included in the review. The findings of this review showed two areas of nursing attention: one related to signs and symptoms management and the other related to health/illness transition. The data that lead to nursing diagnoses can be divided into cognitive and clinical data. The nursing diagnoses were mostly related to secretions retention, excessive mucus production and airway obstruction. The most commonly identified nursing interventions were the educational interventions assembled into pre-design education programs rather than patient-tailored programs.
Conclusions
The findings of this review can add substantial value for systematising the nursing process related to nursing focus “Airway Clearance”. Reaching a consensus seems highly relevant, as it could improve nursing decision-making, nursing care quality and produce more reliable nursing outcomes.