The relationship between ethical climate perception of intensive care nurses and quality of care

All factors that thought to be affect the quality of care in intensive care units (ICU) need to be addressed within the context of quality of care improvement works. This is a descriptive study planned to exhibit the reflection of the ethical climate perceptions of nurses on the quality of care in ICU. The study is carried out on a volunteer basis with 197 intensive care nurses working in intensive care units of state hospitals in Sakarya. The data is collected by way of The Socio-demographic Information Questionnaire, The Hospital Ethical Climate Survey (HECS) and The Missed Nursing Care Survey. The age average of nurses participated in the study is 29.53±5.52 and 71.1% of them are female. HECS total average score is 3.60±0.6, the highest score is "Patient Factor" (4.04±0.62), while the lowest score is "Hospital Factor" (3.06±0.90) in it's subscales. In terms of HECS, approximately half of the nurses (48.7%) think that safe patient care is given in their units; nearly half of them (45.2%) think that they have never been supported or respected by their hospital. It was determined that the perception of ethical climate in ICU changes due to the working period of nurses, weekly working hours, the way of work and the number of patients who are given care (p<0,05). The most missed care need is patient mobilization, while the least ignored practice is hand washing. While 35% of working nurses remark that they could never ensure patient mobilization, 76.6% state that hand washing is rarely disregarded. Nurses stated that the reasons for failure to meet the patient's care needs are the sudden changes in patient condition (76.1%) followed by short-staffed (75.1). Quality of care and ethical climate are related at the least. The correlation between MNS "needs" scale and HECS "patient factor" (p<0,05) and "collegue factor" subscales is positive, while between "doctor factor" scale is negative (p<0,05). Key Words: Intensive Care Unit, nurse, quality of care, perception of ethical climate