Information Giving to Patients From Nursing Staff

Abstract

Background: Patient’s right to information has been formally acknowledged and legally secured. Patient information is a complex process in which all the members of the therapeutic team are engaged. Aim: The aim of the present study was to search the information given by nursing staff and to investigate the factors that affect the process of information giving. Method: The study sample consisted of patients from the medical and surgical wards of three general hospitals within the NHS from two Health Regions, two in the district and one in Attica. For the purpose of the current study a questionnaire was developed based on a previous study. The interview was the main method of data collection. Data were collected from April 2009 to September 2010, while all the necessary ethical considerations were taken into account. In each module of the questionnaire factor analysis was applied. T-test, one-way analysis of variance and Welch test were used to investigate the correlation of the factors emerged with the characteristics of the study sample, while Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to study the relationship among the factors. In all statistical tests as statistically significant was the level of significance equal to 0.05. The statistical analysis was performed using the statistical program PASW Statistics 18.0. Results: The patient sample (n = 300) had a mean age of 55.4 years (± 17.9 years). The majority were men with lower than high school education, while 64.9% described their health state as either good or very good. The mean length of hospital stay was 6.5 days (± 5.7 days) at the time of interview. Most of the participants felt they generally had received enough information from nursing staff truthfully (64.2%), willingly (62.0%) but on their own initiative (59.9%), whereas information in most cases was given orally (46.2%). Friends and relatives were the most popular source of additional information followed by patient record and mass media. Principal components factor analysis was applied and two factors emerged for the method of giving information, one for the content of information and three for the source of additional information. Patient’s age (p≤0,019), educational level (p≤0,003), previous hospitalization (p=0,008) and health state (p≤0,026) correlated statistically significant with the emerged factors. Conclusions: Even though patients characterized the information they received from nursing personnel adequate, the need for receiving adequate information both in quality and quantity is acknowledged.