Concerns of hospitalized care from patients’ perspectives

Nurses constantly face the need to provide patient care, both physical and psychological, within the health care arena. Nursing staff must have an under standing of the concerns and experiences of hospitalization, and the sensitivity to elicit the patient's own private language of health care needs. The purpose of the study was to examine the concerns of health care needs from patients' point of view. The specific objective was to under stand the experiences of hospitalized patients. The grounded theory method was applied for this purpose with major assumptions from the symbolic inter action perspective. Twelve subjects were recruited from medical and surgical units at a teaching hospital using purposive sampling, and were inter viewed. Data were in the form of transcripts from tapes, field notes, and analytic and process memos. The constant comparative technique was utilized to discover the core themes that would explain most of the variation and integrate the data, codes and memos. Three coding processes, open coding, axial coding, and selective coding, were employed. Six aspects were generated from the results of the study to describe patients' concerns. The hospitalized experience was depicted as searching for certain aspects of health care needs including focus on the physical condition, promptness and effective ness of nursing services, health professionals' caring attitudes when giving service and their responsibility, food preparation, environment, and medical expenses.