Nurses\' perceptions of difficult patients
Abstract
The purpose of this article was to explain and describe how professional nurses in the health services experience difficult patients. A qualitative, descriptive research design was adopted. Data were collected by means of narratives, written by professional nurses who met the sampling criteria. The data analysis was done according to the protocol suggested by Tesch. Four major categories were identified. The first major category, namely patient factors, brought the following sub-categories to the fore: physical aspects and appearance; psychological factors; attitude factors; social factors and knowledge of the patient. The second major category, namely nursing factors, includes the following sub-categories: skills and experience, training and attitude. The third category, namely the situational factor, exists of the sub-category management, while the fourth category exists of one sub-category, namely that difficult patients do not exist. A literature control was done to verify the results. Conclusions and recommendations were made.
Keywords: difficult patients; patient factors; nursing staff factors; situational factors; dissatisfaction
Health SA Gesondheid Vol. 10 (1) 2005: pp. 52-61
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publication rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Note: If you need to comply with your funding body policy, you can apply for the CC BY license after your manuscript is accepted for publication.
