Patients’ Satisfaction. is it Only a Matter of Effective Communication Skills?

Abstract

There are evidences in the literature supporting the relation between clinical communication and patients’ satisfaction. The aim of the present longitudinal study was to explore whether nurses’ self-regulation skills contributes to patients’ satisfaction. 338 nurses (mean age 38.8, SD = 8.8) from Public Hospitals participated in the study. 89 from the 338 nurses participated in a six month intervention programme for the purpose to develop self-regulation skills. The participants filled the following self-reported questionnaires : A goal elicitation procedure (Little, 1983); SRSB(Maes, De Gucht, Heiser, Karoly, & Ruehlman, 2005); Long-Form Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ-III) (Marshall & Hays,1987) Structural Equation Analyses showed that nurses’ self- regulation has significant positive relation with patients’ satisfaction and negative significant relation with patients’ dissatisfaction. The present results underline the important contribution of nurse’s self-regulation to patient’s satisfaction.