[Good nursing: perspectives of patients and family].
This qualitative study aimed to explore patients' perspectives on good nursing for comparison with nurses' perspectives, as identified in a previous study. Purposive sampling was employed to recruit 53 patients and six family members from three medical centers and three regional hospitals, in northern, central, and southern Taiwan. The 59 participants were clustered into nine groups for focus-group interviews for data collection purposes, from March to June, 2003. Most of the participants were male (62.7%), and their mean age was 51.9 years (SD=15.6), with a range from 18 to 81 years old. All of the participants were hospitalized for at least three days and had the physical and mental strength to participate in a 60-90 minute group interview. The interviews were both hand-recorded and audio-taped on site, with permission from the participants, and then transcribed into verbatim narratives for data analysis. Content analysis was used to identify items in relation to good nursing/not-good nursing across narratives. The findings showed that four major categories of good nursing inductively emerged, including: (1) Providing professional nursing as a guardian angel, (2) Demonstrating professional skills with humanity, (3) Being accountable and competent, and (4) Showing self-improvement. The findings indicated that professional nursing competence is the essence of good nursing. Treating patients as relatives is also perceived as good nursing. In comparing the patients definitions of good nursing with those of nurses it was observed that there are similarities in terms of the main categories of the definitions. Patients, however, tend to use negative examples or normative moral terms, such as "should" or "ought to" to connote what is expected of good nursing and how good nursing is expressed in the context of patient-nurse interaction.
Chang
Pi-Fen
PF
School of Nursing, National Yang-Ming University.
Chao
Yu-Mei Yu
YM
Hu
Yoko
Y
Chen
Shu-Yueh
SY
D005190:Family; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D009732:Nursing Care / Q000523:psychology / Q000592:standards*