292 Medico-legal Update, April-June 2020, Vol. 20, No. 2 Evaluation of Quality of Nursing Documentation in Surgical Wards at Baghdad Teaching Hospitals Tahseen R. Mohammed 1 , Haider M. Majeed 2 , Aqeel H. Jasim 3 1 Instructor, 2 Assistant Instructor, 3 Instructor, Fundamentals of Nursing Department, College of Nursing-University of Baghdad Abstract Background: Nursing documentation has been one of the most important functions of nurses. Objectives: To evaluate quality of nursing documents for nursing care at surgical ward and to fnd out the relationship between demographic characteristic with nursing documents. Methodology: A descriptive design study was conducted in the period of 1 st January 2017 to 15 th August 2017. Utilizing a stratifed random sampling method (60) nurses working in surgical ward at Baghdad teaching hospitals. Results: The majority of the study participants were female who accounted for (58.3%) of the total participants while male constituted (41.7%) making a female male ratio of 1.5:1. Most of the study participants (46.7%) were between ages 18 and 27 years old. (71.7) of the nurses were married and the remainder was single. (45%) of the participants had institute graduate. Majority of them (31.7%) were employee (1-5) years in surgical wards, and fnally most of nurses(66.7%) have training session in the nursing documentation. Conclusions: The study showed that nurses have poor nursing documentation in surgical ward and there is no signifcant association between the nursing documentation with some demographic characters of selected nurses but signifcant association between the nursing documentation with training course. Keywords: Evaluation, Quality of Nursing Documentation, Nursing care, Surgical Wards. Corresponding Author: Haider M. Majeed Assistant Instructor, Fundamentals of Nursing Department, College of Nursing-University of Baghdad e-mail: haider_m2008@yahoo.com Introduction Nursing documentation is considered as an important indicator to develop nursing care. According to patient safety law, nurses have to document nursing interventions. [1] Nursing documented has jointly practical and legal embodiment in client care thus kind documentation and true notify are fundamental to improve effciency in client care in any case of the way used to document, the client’s health-care register is a solemn, legal records is client’s patronage specifcs [2,3]. Nurse’s ability to script in a pure brief, fair and legally precise way can safely decrease the danger of misunderstanding and passive patient result concerning to bad communication [4,5] . Nurses have accepted that registration isn’t dismissing from nursing care and it is not permissive. It is an integral section of on fle nurses’ practices, and an important instrument that RNs use to secure high-fneness client care. Literature debate exceedingly the barriers encountered by nurses in recorded involving time limited, mismatches among staffng resources and work overload, shortage of pure guidelines for fll up documentation, repeated at documentation, and the routine systems and institutional policies usually related with protection precise documentation [6] . The major responsibility of nursing