Nurse staffing, nurses' job satisfaction, and patient satisfaction with nursing care in public hospitals in Thailand.

Abstract

The correlational study was conducted to determine the relationships among nurse staffing (proportion of RNs and nurse-to-patient ratio), nurses' job satisfaction, and patient satisfaction with nursing care in inpatient units of public hospitals in Thailand. The inpatient units, as well as RNs and patient subjects, were selected by using multi-stage sampling from public hospitals in the eastern region of Thailand. The instruments used in this study were (a) Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS; Spector, 1985) to measure job satisfaction of RNs, (b) Patient Satisfaction Instrument (PSI; Hinshaw & Atwood, 1982) to measure patient satisfaction with nursing care, (c) demographic questionnaires to collect demographic characteristics of RNs and patients, and (d) the unit characteristics form to collect nurse staffing data in each inpatient unit. Data were collected from 68 inpatient units at 4 public hospitals. After deleting 13 inpatient units that did not meet the criteria and statistical assumptions, the final sample consisted of 55 inpatient units with 447 RNs and 580 patients. A hierarchical multiple regression was used to determine the relationships among nurse staffing, nurses' job satisfaction, and patient satisfaction with nursing care.The findings of this study demonstrated that nurse-to-patient ratio in the unit was an important factor that correlated significantly with patient satisfaction with nursing care at the unit level. However, nurse staffing (proportion of RNs and nurse-to-patient ratio) was not correlated significantly with nurses' job satisfaction, and nurses' job satisfaction was not correlated significantly with patient satisfaction with nursing care. The findings also suggested that the proportion of RNs was not correlated significantly with patient satisfaction with nursing care. In addition, findings demonstrated that nurse-to-patient ratio in the inpatient unit sample was not high. RNs in the 55 units had moderate satisfaction with their job, and patients in these units had moderate satisfaction with nursing care.