Nurses' Caring behavior in medical-surgical units, Cambodia : the comparison among the perception of patients, nurses and nursing students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore and compare the perception of the nurses’ caring behavior among the patients, nurses and nursing students. This study used a descriptive survey design. The Caring Behavior Inventory (CBI) was used to explore and compare the perception among patients, nurses from medical-surgical units and nursing students from the school of nursing. In addition, the demographic data were also obtained. The participants included 105 patients and 57 nurses from Khmer-Soviet Friendship hospital and Preah Kossamak hospital and 150 nursing students from Technical School for Medical Care were included in this study. The findings indicated statistically significant differencesamong the groups (patients, nurses and nursing students). The means of the patients on how they perceived the nurse caring behavior were lower than the means of the nurse and nursing students in every subscale of the CBI-42 items. Although there were no significant differences between the nurses’ perception and the nursing students’ on how they perceived nurses caring behaviors. However, the means score of nursing students were slightly lower than means of nurses in every subscales of except the last subscales (Attentive to Other’s experience). The one way ANOVA was utilized to demonstrated significant different on all the five subscales. The result of the analysis of variance on total CBI-42 items scores. Since F-value (98.358) exceeded the null hypothesis of equal means among three groups then leading to rejection of equal means among the groups at (p<.01)level.Tukey HSD post-hoc test was then run to compare the differences perceptions amongthe groups in each subscale of CBI. All the significant value subscales of the patients differ to the nurses and nursing students (p <.01) while the nurse and nursing students showed no differences. This study which carried out in the medical-surgical unit, Cambodia showed evidence that the perceptions between the patients were different to the nurses and nursing students. It is essential to understand what the patients, nurses and nursing students viewed as important caring behaviors so that the nurses can avoid conflict with the patients.