Inpatient Satisfaction With Nursing Care And Its Influencing Factors In 3-A-Grade General Hospitals In Beijing

Background: "Patient-centered" service quality improvement is the topic of hospital management. Patient satisfaction with nursing care has influence on the overall satisfaction with the hospital, and it's an important indicator of nursing quality. To explore the level of satisfaction and its influencing factors is beneficial to quality improvement, but it needs further study in China.Objective: To describe inpatient satisfaction with nursing care in 3-A-grade general hospitals in Beijing and to explore its influencing factors.Method: Multistage sampling was applied to recruit 1520 inpatients before discharge in 4 3-A-grade general hospitals in the period from July to December, 2008. Newcastle Satisfaction with Nursing Scale (NSNS) was administered to assess patient satisfaction. The demographic and health status questionnaire, the nurse job satisfaction questionnaire, and the ward organizational factors questionnaire were administered to explore the influencing factors.Results: (1) 82.9% inpatients were satisfied with nursing care. The average total score of NSNS is 79.25±15.48 (0～100), the item that patients most satisfied was the feeling of privacy (91%), and the most unsatisfied item was the amount of information nurses gave to them about their condition and treatment (68.4%). (2) Taking the patient as study unit, the multiple linear regression revealed that patients' age, education level, self-report health status and department influence their satisfaction with nursing care, but only explained 8.1% of the variance. (3) Taking the ward as study unit, the beds service rate and operative quantity influence patient satisfaction with nursing care, explained 27.7% of the variance.Conclusion: (1) Inpatient satisfaction with nursing care was lower than the criteria of Chinese Ministry of Health (90%), patients' needs were not met fully;(2) Patients with characters of old age, lower education level, better self-report health status and in medical department were more satisfied. (3) Wards with heavy workload such as higher beds service rate and larger operative quantity showed lower level of patient satisfaction. To meet patients' need and improve the nursing quality, managers should take these results into account, individual nursing care should be implemented according to the patient's character, and nursing manpower scheduling should be based on the workload.