Patients’ Expectations for Nurses and Nursing:

A Review of the Literature

Abstract

When the roles of nurses are discussed, it is essential to consider perspectives of patients, who take health care while participate in and form it. Therefore it is important for those who engage in nursing to know the expectations patients have for health care and nurses. This literature review was conducted to identify a trend and the findings of previous studies about expectations of patients for nurses and nursing at a hospital in Japan.

Ichushi-Web was searched for studies which investigated on patients' expectations and published between 1983 and 2008, so that 43 articles turned up. Most of them were issues of recent years. Thirtyone articles described specific expectations for nurses or nursing such as a specific care, behavior and patients. Several studies used Likert scale, but any did not identify which item had relative importance.

Studies which investigated expectations for whole of nurses' practice were chosen and contents of patients' expectations were examined mainly on four studies that matched criteria for minute examination. As a result, elements concerned with technical components and with interpersonal relationships emerged. However there were few arguments over what technical elements meant. It is necessary for nursing education and career development to look into that more concretely. In addition, both nurses' practices as a team performance and function in health care were hardly mentioned in patients' expectations. Other research approaches to the expectations are required to grasp them about such roles and functions.