What Quality of Care Means? Exploring Clinical Nurses’ Perceptions on the Concept of Quality Care: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Quality is a multidimensional issue involving various features that depend on service performance and personal assessment. Clarifying the concept of quality is essential in order to further facilitate the understanding and improvement of quality in healthcare. The purpose of this study was to investigate how clinical nurses, providing care to adult medical patients, perceive and define the concept of quality nursing care. A descriptive qualitative research design was applied. A purposive sampling strategy was used to recruit nurses from the clinical sector of a general public hospital in Athens, Greece. Ten female nurses from the medical sector participated the study. Data collection was conducted through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Conventional content analysis was used to analyze the verbatim data. Four categories were revealed from the data analysis, namely: (a) “Quality care is holistic care”, (b) “Good care is an interpersonal issue”, (c) “Leadership is crucial”, and (d) “Best care is our responsibility”. Quality care was defined as holistic care, addressing all patient needs with competency and aiming for the best patient outcomes. It was associated with communication, teamwork, good leadership, and personal commitment. By developing an in-depth and mutual understanding about what quality means, nurse leaders and practitioners may collaborate in finding common paths to support quality interventions and enhance quality nursing care in clinical practice.

Nurses' safety climate, quality of care, and standard precautions adherence and compliance: A cross‐sectional study

“…Quality of care is reflected in nurses' provision of holistic patient care. This includes addressing client needs, nurse competency, and optimum patient satisfaction (Stavropoulou et al., 2022). Quality of care and health services depend on patient‐providers' communication, teamwork, and suitable working environments.…”

“…Healthcare organizations' high‐quality care outcomes include patient‐centered care, customer satisfaction, staff competency, climate safety, and patient engagement in decision‐making (WHO, 2018). Quality of care among nurses is described as competent holistic care that addresses a patient's overall needs with the objective of providing a high level of satisfaction (Stavropoulou et al., 2022) and must be continuously improved by implementing a patient safety culture. Consequently, high‐quality nursing care directly impacts patient safety (Nakano et al., 2021).…”

“…Consequently, high‐quality nursing care directly impacts patient safety (Nakano et al., 2021). Previous research reported the differences in patients' and nurses' perceptions of safety culture quality, and the relationships between patient care and treatment perceptions, engagement, and satisfaction (Nakano et al., 2021; Stavropoulou et al., 2022; Yoo et al., 2021), and SP adherence and compliance (Berdida, 2023; Bernard et al., 2018; Hessels et al., 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, investigations on mediating effects of nurses' quality of care between safety climate on SP adherence and compliance remain underreported, particularly among developing countries like the Philippines.…”

Psychometric testing of the Persian version of the Nursing Care Quality Scale: A methodological study

“…The quality of nursing care (QNC) and its relationship with patient safety is an important issue, which has attracted considerable attention on the part of healthcare organizations globally. Quality includes different attributes that depend on service performance and personal assessment (Stavropoulou et al, 2022). Organizations vary in the way they assess quality.…”

Quality Care in Outpatient Chemotherapy. Design and Validation of the Novel Care Quality Ambulatory Instrument

“…Then, there is the level of perfection, understood as the absence of errors, flaws, or imperfections. Also, from a qualitative perspective, quality care implies holistic care, which is an interpersonal aspect and a matter of leadership and responsibility to provide the best care (7). In light of the importance of nursing care in the context of healthcare services, instruments have also been designed to address this perception and experience (8,9), with the CUCACE being the most widely used in a variety of nursing settings and services (10).…”