Nurses’ Perception of Caring Attitudes and Behaviours - A Cross-sectional Study in a Geriatric Hospital

Abstract

Introduction: Nurses’ attitudes and behaviours can have a major impact on patients’ well-being, security and care satisfaction. Nurses’ perceptions of adopting caring attitudes and behaviours in a geriatric context are under-investigated. Aim: Describe nurses’ perceptions regarding the importance, competency, and feasibility aspects of their caring attitudes and behaviours, and compare each investigated care domain (clinical, relational, humanistic and comforting) with nurses’ perceptions of their importance, competency and feasibility. Design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: 90 nurses were recruited with a convenience sample. The Caring Nurse-Patient Interaction-23 item scale and a sociodemographic questionnaire were used to collect data from October to December 2017. Results: Nurses assigned high scores with an overall mean of 4.01 ± 0.28 for all items. On all items, the scores of the scale of importance (M=4.56, SD= 0.32) were higher than the ones of perceived competency (M=3.98, SD=0.36) and perceived feasibility (M=3.47, SD=0.49). Analysis by domain showed that nurses highly rated humanistic care on two out of three scales (importance M=4.82, SD=0.29 and feasibility M=3.91, SD=0.69), whereas relational care was the lowest (feasibility M=2.80, SD=0.64). Conclusion: Nurses valued caring and felt fairly competent. However, it was difficult for them to adopt caring attitudes and behaviours in their own practice.