Attitudes and Behavior of Nurses in State and Private Hospitals with Respect to Family-Centered Care

Abstract

© The Journal of Current Pediatrics, published by Galenos Publishing. Introduction: The study was conducted as descriptive research for purpose of comparing the attitudes of nurses working at private and state hospitals with respect to the concept of having parents participate in the care of their children. Materials and Methods: The universe of the descriptive research comprised 70 nurses working at two state hospitals and one private hospital in city center of Istanbul, between the dates May 1-June 30, 2013. As data collection tools, two forms, namely a Nurses Information Form and a Parent Participation Attitude Scale (PPAS) were used in the research. The lowest possible score on the scale is 24; the highest 120. The higher scores on the scale indicate more positive attitudes about having parents participate in the care given to their children. The data were analyzed in terms of numbers, percentages and means. Results: The nurses in the study were found to have similar identifying characteristics (p>0.05). They were asked whether they knew about family-centered care, 64.3% said they were familiar with the subject; when the source of their knowledge was queried, 34.8% stated that they had been informed through scientific publications and courses they took during their professional training. Of the nurses, 54.3% were found to display total parent participation attitude scores of 84 and above. In the evaluation of the PPAS scores of the nurses in terms of the hospital they worked, the scores of nurses working at state hospitals (85.67±6.17) were significantly more positive than the scores of the nurses working at the private hospital (81.88±5.26) (p<0.05). Conclusions: The accepting attitudes of nurses regarding the family-centered care approach indicated that nurses with higher level of education had opportunity to benefit from the focus placed on family-centered care in graduate nursing school programs and that had positive effect on their attitudes.