The Intervention of Medical Social Workers: Humanistic Care of Cardiovascular Disease Patients

To explore the implementation pathway and effectiveness of medical social workers and nurses in humanistic care nursing and to evaluate the impact of this collaborative model on patient satisfaction and healthcare resource utilization efficiency in cardiovascular wards.

This study adopted a quasi-experimental pre- and post-test design to implement humanistic care intervention in the cardiovascular ward of a tertiary care hospital in Zhuhai, China, from September to November 2023. A collaborative team consisting of two medical social workers and four charge nurses, based on the three-stage service process of "pre-hospital assessment-hospital care-discharge follow-up", systematically provided four core humanistic care services of "case management, group support, humanistic environment creation, and social resource connection". Researchers used the Chinese version of the Patient Satisfaction with Nursing Care Questionnaire (PSNCQQ) to assess 36 inpatients in pairs, and they collected operational indicators such as average hospitalization days, the ward bed occupancy rate, and number of admissions for comprehensive assessment.

Patient satisfaction scores improved from 89.72 (94.44% satisfaction rate) before the intervention to 94.17 (99.12% satisfaction rate) after the intervention, and the paired-samples t-test showed that the difference was statistically significant (t = 5.01, p < 0.001). During the same period, the bed occupancy rate increased from 65.40% to 80.61%, the number of inpatient admissions increased by 27.39%, from 157 to 200, and the average length of hospitalization decreased from 6.07 to 5.76 days. During the intervention period, researchers conducted 27 group activities, covering 328 participant attendances. We provided case management services to 18 patients, serving 54 service sessions, and completed 12 screenings for potential doctor-patient conflicts, covering 480 participant attendances.

Humanistic care nursing carried out by medical and social collaboration can effectively improve patient satisfaction, optimize resource allocation, and fill the gap in social support and psychological care in traditional nursing, which has good clinical promotion value.