Perception of Patients Towards Nurses’ Attitudes: Implication on the Public Image of Nursing

Abstract

Background: The negative public image of Nurses is not in agreement with the important work they do. There is therefore a need to investigate what attracted this negative image to Nurses.

Aim: The study aims to investigate patients’ perception of nurses’ attitudes and how that impact on their perception of the public image of nurses

Method: A cross-sectional descriptive design was used to select 380 patients attending clinics/admitted in the wards in a tertiary hospital, Zaria systematically. The ensuing data was subjected to rigorous quantitative analysis with the aid of Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25.0.

Result: While the majority of the respondents were of the opinion that nurses are not friendly or tend to shout at them (166 or 51.4% and 165 or 51% respectively), the majority were also of the view that the nurses were competent and efficient in professional service delivery such as; administering the medication on time (117 or 87%, n=134), doing the necessary temperature checks (239 or 74%, n=323), and overall dedication to duty (294 or 91%, n=323).

Conclusion: Patients have negative perceptions towards nurses’ attitudes as such; nurses need to work on their social skills and attitudes in order to complement their technical competence as a way of improving patient perception and public image. Among the recommendations for achieving this are training of nurses on positive attitude and stress management, formal recognition of friendly Nurses, and wearing of name tags to easy identified by patients.

Keywords: Perception, Public image, Nursing, Patient.