Abstract
Introduction: The quality of care affects patients’ satisfaction. To provide high quality care, nurses face ethical challenges in daily practice. Moral sensitivity is the first phase in moral implementation. This study aimed to determine the relationship between nurses’ moral sensitivity and patients’ satisfaction in medical wards.Methods: In descriptive correlational study 198 nurses and 198 patients in 17 medical wards filled out the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire (MSQ) and Patient Satisfaction with Nursing Care Quality Questionnaire (PSNCQQ), respectively. Nurses were sampled by the census method. For each nurse, a patient was selected randomly from the same ward. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 13. Results: The highest scores were in the dimensions of “relational orientation” and “following the rules”, and the lowest scores were in the dimensions of “autonomy” and “experiencing moral conflicts”. The highest level of patients’ satisfaction was with “nurses’ professional performance” 3.98 (1.09), and the lowest level was with “nurses’ routine work” 2.69 (1.22). There was no significant relationship between the mean of patient satisfaction and moral sensitivity of nurses.Conclusion: Considering that nurses had a higher score in dimension of “following the rules” and a lower score in dimension of “autonomy”, it seems ethical performance in the real situation is not merely due to the nurses’ moral sensitivity and it seems the complexity of the organization causes nurses face difficulties in making decisions related to clinical practice; therefore, policy makers in the health system should be able to identify barriers.
Highlights
The quality of care affects patients’ satisfaction
In all, 198 nurses and 198 patients participated in 17 medical wards of hospitals affiliated with Tabriz University of Medical Sciences
The lowest scores were in the dimensions of “autonomy” and “experiencing moral conflicts” and the highest scores were in the dimensions of “relational orientation” and “following the rules.”
Summary
The quality of care affects patients’ satisfaction. To provide high quality care, nurses face ethical challenges in daily practice. Nurses are faced with issues like the right to life and death; the increasing medical interventions in patient care; changes in health requirements and nursing concepts; grows in numbers of elderly people and end of life care; limiting patients autonomy and so on All of these factors have led nurses to be treated with this situations that require ethical decision-making.[4] In a study by Başak et al, in Turkey, 46.7% of nurses in special wards were faced with moral problems, and 35.7% of them were unable to solve their moral problems.[5]
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