Nurses’ emotional tone toward older inpatients: Do cognitive impairment and acute hospital setting matter?

Communication behavior of cognitively impaired older inpatients

“…Variables describing features on the patient, nurses, and organizational level are displayed; p‑ values refer to differences in the magnitude of associations for the verbal versus the relationship aspect adjusted by the Bonferroni-Holm correction for multiple univariate comparisons; significant p- values after correction are in boldface a Single item [34] ranging from 1 (very good) to 5 (very poor) b 6CIT 6‑Item Cognitive Impairment Test [17]; lower error scores indicate a better verbal memory recall c,d Mean emotional tone ratings of naïve judges [32] ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very) n varies due to (a) difficulties to answer the question or (c,d) not fulfilling criteria for rating procedure* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001…”

“…Most of the nurses’ measures were not significantly correlated with the CODEM factors. An explanation may rely on previous findings in the acute care hospital setting indicating that factors such as the salient functional status of patients might play a more important role in eliciting nurses’ communication behavior than cognitive impairment per se [32]. With respect to social-contextual variables, patients’ nonverbal communication behavior increased during the evening shift.…”

“…The data were part of a larger cross-sectional study on elderspeak in the acute care hospital setting conducted from September 2017 to March 2018. Detailed information on the study design and recruitment procedure can be found elsewhere [32]. Briefly, participants were recruited from a general internal medicine ward ( n = 36 beds, mean length of stay = 4.9 days) and a geriatric ward ( n = 35 beds; mean length of stay = 16.5 days) of two acute care hospital settings ( n = 114 and 105 beds, respectively).…”

“…This corresponds to the precalculated sample size of at least 50 patients (50% with CI) per hospital setting. For further information on sampling see [32].…”

“…To assess the underlying affective qualities of social communication in terms of a controlling and a person-centered tone of voice, nurses’ emotional tone was judged by naïve raters using the two subscales (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.98 for both) of the Emotional Tone Rating Scale [38]. Detailed information on the rating procedure can be found elsewhere [32].…”