Patient-nurse collaboration: a comparison of patients' and nurses' attitudes in Finland, Japan, Norway, and the U.S.A

Abstract

While there has been an increasing emphasis on patients' participation in decisions concerning health care and nursing in the literature as an ideal, it is not clear to what extent patients and nurses assume the consumerist attitude regarding health-care decision making. With the view that attitudes people hold regarding their role in health care and nursing will primarily affect the way they behave in health-care situations, a multinational study was carried out to examine five sets of attitudes regarding consumerism held by patients in acute-care hospitals and nurses working in them. The findings from the surveys in Finland, Japan, Norway, and the U.S.A. indicate that while the patients and the nurses in these countries tend to lean toward the consumerist perspective in their attitudes, there were significant differences in the acculturation of these attitudes among the countries and between the patients and nurses. Two different models for the explanation of attitude regarding collaborative decision making in nursing practice emerged for the patients and the nurses as groups. For both groups, however, age and the more general consumerist attitudes have a bearing on their attitudes regarding collaboration in nursing.