Assessment of nursing students and nurses' orientation towards patient-centeredness

Being patient centered is a core value for nursing. Patient centered-care has been related to patient and health provider satisfaction, better health outcomes, higher quality of care and more efficient health care delivery.

The purpose was to assess the orientation adopted by nurses and students in patient care, using The Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale, as well as to compare the results between resident nurses and students from different academic years.

Public School of Nursing and a Central Hospital, in Lisbon (Portugal).

Students in the first, second and fourth year of nursing school and nurses participated in the study.

For data collection, we used The Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale (European Portuguese version), an instrument designed to measure individual preferences toward the dimension of caring a sharing in health professional-patient relationship. Students and nurses also filled out two additional questions about their perception of competence in technical and communication skills. Additional demographic information was also collected, including gender, age, academic year and length of professional experience.

A total of 525 students (84.7% female) and 108 nurses (77.8% female) participated in this study. In general, caring sub-scores, measuring the preference of about attending to patient emotional aspects, were higher than sharing sub-scores, measuring beliefs about giving information and perceiving patient as a member of the health team. Students were significantly more patient-centered throughout their nursing education (p<0.001). Comparing to students in the second and fourth academic years (p<0.001) nurses' scores were significantly lower both in total PPOS and in caring and sharing subscales.

These results reinforce the idea that patient centeredness may be developed in academic context. The scores obtained highlight the importance of studies that aim to identify factors that may explain the decrease of patient centeredness in professional practice.