Staff nurses' evaluation of care process quality and patient outcomes in long‐term care hospitals: A cross‐sectional questionnaire survey

Abstract

Aim: Despite the large and growing body of research on quality care evaluation and improvements in long-term care facilities, issues regarding the quality of care provided prevail worldwide. Further and more diverse research related to this topic is urgently required. To that end, this study examines the association between the subjective care process evaluations of nurses and selected patient outcomes in Japanese long-term care hospitals. Method: To conduct a cross-sectional survey, we approached 2,000 long-term care hospitals in Japan, of which 263 (13.2%) completed and returned the questionnaires. We recruited ward managers and all full/part-time nurses in one ward from each hospital. We questioned managers about six patient outcome indicators: prevalence of physical restraint, urinary tract infections, indwelling catheter use, monthly incidence of new pressure ulcers, falls and recreational activities. We examined the nurses' care process evaluations using nine questions pertaining to daily caregiving activities developed from previous qualitative research. We examined the association between the ward averages of the nurses' evaluations and selected patient outcomes using the generalised linear model with a negative binomial distribution, with the exception of recreational activities for which we used a Poisson distribution, controlling for ward size and patient case mix. Results: We analysed the responses with complete data for outcome indicators from 199 (10.0%) managers and 2,508 nurses. Some patient outcome indicators were significantly associated with the nurses' care process evaluations, namely, urinary tract infections (B = −1.28, p < .001), indwelling catheter use (B = −0.57, p < .049), pressure ulcers (B = −1.20, p < .001) and recreational activities (B = 1.48, p < .001). These results suggest that better patient outcomes were associated with higher care process evaluations. Conclusion: The nurses' evaluations and certain patient outcome indicators were associated. When considering potential quality improvement programmes, focusing on these evaluations will be beneficial. YAMAMOTO-MITANI eT Al. 1 | INTRODUC TI ON Research related to quality evaluation in long-term care facilities has been conducted for many years using various quality indicators. Nevertheless, we continue to have major quality-related concerns (Burke & Werner, 2019). In previous long-term care studies, there have been numerous conceptualisations and measurements of care quality, and while some of the measures were associated with cli

Ward‐level nurse turnover and related workplace factors in long‐term care hospitals: A cross‐sectional survey

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The association between nurses’ burnout and objective care quality indicators: a cross-sectional survey in long-term care wards

“…The principal research question was "Is objectively measured care quality in LTC wards related to staff nurses' burnout?" Data reported in this manuscript are a part of a broader research project [23][24][25]. The current topic and results are distinct with no redundancy or duplication between the current study and any of the published studies from the same research project.…”