DNP 820 Topic 2 Discussion Question Two
DNP 820 Topic 2 Discussion Question Two
Within nursing, the patient’s perception is recognized as the patient’s reality. How does this way of knowing in nursing fit within an objective or subjective paradigm of the world? Explain your reasoning.
Patients’ perception of care quality refers to patients’ view of services received and the results of the treatment and are monitored to assess the delivery and quality of healthcare, while patient experiences is a reflection of what actually happened during the care
process [1, 2]. Improving the quality of health care delivery is an important global priority and the purpose of health care quality improvement initiatives is to ensure patient safety, improve clinical effectiveness, and promote public accountability [3,4,5].
Providing high-quality care and ensuring patient satisfaction is a challenge that healthcare organizations face globally. Exploring the quality of nursing care from the patients’ perspective including patient satisfaction has been an essential part of quality of health care evaluation. As a result, hospital management and accreditations require regular measurement of patient satisfaction and experience as integral part of their quality evaluation process despite its complexity and difficulty to measure [6,7,8,9,10].
Patient satisfaction is the link between their perceptions of quality and their future intention to use the service or recommend it to others. As patient satisfaction is an important indicator of nursing and overall quality of care, a more focused and direct measurement of patient perception of nursing quality care is warranted and some validated tools have been developed specifically to assess the patient perception of quality of care [11,12,13,14]. Nursing care most closely influences patients’ satisfaction with the overall quality of care, and therefore, the importance of measuring patient perception of quality of nursing care cannot be emphasized enough [10, 15]. In line with this, a recent Australian study demonstrated the direct relation of patient experience and perception of nursing quality of care [16].
Quality of nursing care has been among the major focus for the public and the Ethiopian government and the federal ministry of health has been running a sector wide reform aimed at improving the quality and accessibility of health service at all levels of the country through implementing hospital reform guideline; one of the main components of this guideline focusing on improving quality of care [15,16,17, 18]. Patient perception of quality of care is inadequately explored especially in developing countries including Ethiopia. Assessing patient perception and experiences of the quality of care not only provides information about the actual experiences, but also reveals which quality aspects patients regard as most important [12, 19]. Despite presence of many studies of the determinants and status of patient perception on quality of nursing care worldwide, there is scarcity of evidences in Ethiopia inspiring us to undergo this study to assess the perception of patients on the quality of nursing care in St Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College, one of the biggest tertiary centers in the country.