Evaluation of patient family members' perception of nurses' roles in surgical clinics

Objective: The aim of the study was to evaluate the perception of nursing roles at the Surgical Clinics in the Dokuz Eylül University Hospital. This study was preformed, on the relatives of the patients, in surgical clinics. Method: The aim was to perform a cross sectional, descriptive and prospective study on patients family member. 150 members of family were to be analysed. Patients stayed that these consisted of Orthopaedics, Traumatology, Urology, Neurosurgery, General Surgery, Thoracic, Cardiovascular Surgery and Otorhinolaryngology services. All patients were redeemed inpatient. As a data collection tool, the patient-relatives information form developed by the researcher and Fox et al. (2005) developed and validated and reliability by Kaya et al. (2006) Family Perceptions of Nurses' Roles Scale was used. In the analysis of the data, percentage, t test, kruskal-wallis and Anova variance analysis were applied in SPSS 18.0 package program. Result: The mean age of the relatives of the patients in the surgical services was 43.82 ± 13.11, 71.3% were women, 48.7% were unemployed, 31.3% were university graduates, 72% were married, 50% were living in metropolitan areas, 75.3% were experienced as patient's relatives and 28% were the patient's offspring. The mean treatment day of the inpatient was 10.44±18.85, 52% of patients had an acute diagnosis, 76% had undergone an operation and 73.3% had a planned operation. Nursing role's perception with the highest perception score; "let me help take care of the patient." on the other hand lowest perception score; " Ask me about how I am doing ( ask how am I coping with the situation i how I am sleeping, eating etc.)." Conclusion: The patients' relatives; occupation, marital status, age , education statues, experience of be patient' relative and the number of days of hospitalization of the patients significantly effect statistically the nursing perception scores. In general, nursing perception scores of the relatives of the patients were found to be high. Key Words: Nurse's roles, relative of patient, surgery nursing