Nurse-elderly patient communication in home care and institutional care: an explorative study

This study explores communication patterns between nurses and elderly patients in two different care settings. In a sample of 181 video-taped nursing encounters, involving 47 nurses and 109 patients, a study was made of nurse-patient communication. The video recordings were observed using an adapted version of Roter's Interaction Analysis System, which yields frequencies of 23 types of verbal behaviours. These data were analyzed using correspondence analysis, to reduce them to a smaller number of verbal categories, in which two socio-emotional categories and three categories with task-related communication, could be distinguished. For each encounter five summary statistics corresponding to these categories were calculated. Using analysis of variance, it was shown that the amount of socio-emotional interaction in both settings appeared to be higher than was reported in previous studies into nurse-patient communication. Compared with the home for the elderly, communication was more task-related in home care.