The relationship between psychiatric nurses' communication skills and patients' evaluations of their nursing care.

The present study tested the assumption that an environment conducive to therapeutic experiences is largely determined by the nurse's ability to give understanding, helpful responses in the nurse-psychiatric patient interaction. It was expected that there would be a significant correlation between the nurse's ability to give understanding. Helpful responses and the patients' positive evaluation of the therapeutic care they were receiving from professional nurses during their hospitalization. Ellsworth's Patients Opinion of the Ward Protocol (1966) was revised to apply to "nursing personnel" specifically rather than "ward Personnel" in general and administered to all available patients on the psychiatric divisions of seven Utah hospitals. Patients participating in the study did so, on a voluntary basis. One hundred ten patient protocols were obtained, of which thirteen were eliminated on basis of being unreliable and invalid. Jensen's Nurse-Psychiatric Patient Interaction Inventory (1966) was administered to 44 professional nurses working on the 10 psychiatric divisions of the 7 hospitals. Each of the patient protocols was scored individually on eight factor solution and the mean score for each factor was obtained for the ten psychiatric wards. These means were used as measures of the patients' typical satisfaction with their psychiatric nursing care. A mean score on the NPPII was obtained for each of the then psychiatric wards. These means were used as the measures of the quality of the nurses' verbal responses to psychiatric patients. Rho correlations were calculated between each of the POW factor scores and the NPPII scores for the ten wards. None of these correlations were significant. This failed to support the expectation that there would be a significant correlation between the nurses' ability to give understanding, helpful responses and the patients' positive evaluation of the therapeutic care they were receiving from professional nurses during their hospitalization. Various possible reasons for the lack of correlations were discussed.