The nurse's role in providing information to surgical patients and family members in Turkey: a descriptive study

In 2008, we conducted a nonexperimental, cross-sectional, descriptive study in the surgical services department of a hospital in Istanbul, Turkey, with the aim of determining how much information was required by perioperative patients and their family members, the extent to which this information was provided, and the role that nurses play in this process. We included a total of 394 outpatients and inpatients and their family members (ie, 197 patients, 197 family members) and 30 nurses in the study. We collected the research data by using one questionnaire for patients, a second for family members of patients, and a third for nurses. We discovered that the patients and their family members wanted to be given more information about the surgical process than they had received. Patients wanted more information about the intraoperative period, whereas their family members wanted more information about the postoperative period. We also found that nurses were aware that they did not play an effective role in providing information to patients and their family members because of a lack of knowledge about what information they were responsible for providing and insufficient staffing. We concluded that nurses should know what education they are responsible for providing, put more effort into understanding patient and family member information needs, and plan a better means of providing information to meet those needs.