Barriers to Providing High-Quality Nursing Care in Intensive Care Units: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Background: Providing high-quality nursing care is the vision of healthcare systems. Several factors contribute to providing high-quality care, which many of them need further investigation. In this line, qualitative research that helps researchers to access the thoughts and feelings of participants can play an important role in identifying care challenges. Objectives: Therefore, this study aimed to identify nurses’ concerns about the nursing care quality process in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Methods: In this study, a conventional content analysis was used for data analyses. Data were collected by unstructured interviews with 10 ICU nurses. Participants were selected using the purposive sampling technique. The sampling continued upon reaching data saturation. Results: In total 290 codes were extracted, that using analysis and compare were categorized into three 3 main categories: "care barriers ", "motivational barriers ", and "management barriers ". Twelve sub categories were also extracted, including: "high workload", "not considering the educational needs", "not considering the work standards", "out of duty cares", "ward's bad structure", "personal motivation shortage", "poor work motivation", "personal and organizational motivation interference", "rules without work support", "work inconsistency in the ward", "keeping the position", and "inefficient communications between nurses and physicians". Conclusions: In this study, barriers to nursing high-quality care and its related motivational and managerial dimensions were investigated. In other words, the present study identified barriers in different dimensions, and by identifying the effective factors in providing quality care has facilitated the implementation of measures to address the problems.