Patient's Needs from Quality Health Care Dimensions as Ranked by Nurses and Patients

Abstract

s Quality can vary markedly between organizations, It is important that health care organizations define precisely what quality care means to patients as well as health team This paper aimed to compare the ranking of patients' needs for quality health care dimensions by nurses and patients. Each subject of the 150 patients was interviewed and asked to rank each of these needs, also the nurses (n=45) were requested to rank these needs not according to their own priorities, but as they thought the patients would do, by separately answering a questionnaire developed by the researchers based on (Götherström et al., 1995, Farrell, 1991). the results revealed that the patients gives high first priority of care as regard continuity, accessibility, and security (74.0, 70.8, 67.3 ) while nurses give the priority to security, accessibility, and continuity (86.7, 73.8, 53.3 ) respectively It is noteworthy that all patients and nurses gives low priority of care as regard integrity (13.3). Overall, no statistically significant difference was found between the ranking of nurses and patients related to the overall quality care dimensions p=0.861., It was recommended that hospital administrators and clinicians must identify particular patient' needs as an indicator of patient's satisfactions, and develop interventions to meet those needs and priorities, Further studies are recommended to identify the effect of social determinates of patients on their ranking of needs, the difference between patients needs in critical care settings, and the effect of providing care based on patients' needs on the care cost- effectivenes