Conceptualizing the Humanized Hospital: A Multidimensional Textual Data Analysis from Undergraduate Nursing Students'...

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Quality
• Nursing Education
• Patient-Centered Care

Background:

• Humanization of care is vital for healthcare quality but context-dependent.
• Nursing students' perceptions are key to understanding humanized care values in education.
• Representations of the humanized hospital reveal how values are formed during training.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore undergraduate nursing students' conceptualizations of a humanized hospital.
• Investigate how future healthcare professionals define essential elements of humanized care.

Main Methods:

• Qualitative exploratory study with 742 undergraduate nursing students in Italy.
• Data collected via a single open-ended written question on imagining a humanized hospital.
• Automatic Analysis of Textual Data (ATD) within Exploratory Multidimensional Data Analysis (EMDA) framework used for large-scale textual analysis.

Main Results:

• Students described the humanized hospital as an integrated, system-oriented environment.
• Humanization linked to empathy, respect, organizational functioning, teamwork, resources, and competence.
• Two dimensions identified: organizational systems enabling person-centered care and professional competence supporting holistic patient understanding.

Conclusions:

• Nursing students hold a multidimensional view of hospital humanization, seeing it as an emergent property of the environment.
• Effective humanization requires simultaneous focus on relational, educational, and organizational levels.
• Nursing education and institutions must foster conditions supporting sustained humanized care.