A comparison of patient/nurse perceptions about current and future recovery status

Research comparing patient and caregiver perceptions suggests that caregivers tend to be negatively biased in their assessment of patients. That is, they are more likely to judge the patients' status more negatively than the patients themselves. The data analyses, however, have not always been as informative about the extent of disagreement. Our data on the extent to which patients who had a myocardial infarction and their nurses' assessments differed suggest that, in the case of the patients' current status, there were no differences in the aggregate between patients' and nurses' assessments. Examination of the discrepancies between the pairs, however, suggests that in some cases nurses are more negative in their assessments than their patients. In the case of beliefs about the future, nurses were significantly more negative, in the aggregate, than patients, and the extent of this difference is further elaborated in the examination of the discrepancies. Nevertheless, with respect to both current and future status, the correlations between patients and nurses were low, indicating little, if any, shared variation. Because this study did not examine the relationship between either patients' or nurses' perceptions of recovery status, and the patients' actual recovery status, further research is needed to further determine the implications of this work. The meaning of these results for clinical nurse specialists (CNS) is discussed.