Patients’ Relative Satisfaction with Nursing Care: A Case Study of Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Calabar

Psychiatric nurses like any other caregiver are more answerable to themselves and others for service rendered to their patients. The patients though with abnormal behaviour, have right of quality care and safety and nurses are held liable on failure to provide such. The study adopted a cross sectional, descriptive research design to assess patient relatives’ satisfaction with nursing services in Federal Neuro-psychiatric Hospital, Calabar, and Cross River State. Four (4) research questions were raised to direct the course of this study. A total of 58 patients’ relatives who responded to the questionnaire were sampled using convenient sampling procedure. A well validated and reliable questionnaire was used as instrument for data collection. Data collected was analyzed using frequency counts, simple percentages and mean scores. Finding revealed that there was marked improvement of Patients’ health status prior to grant of trial leave as compared to their health status when they were admitted into the hospital. Nearly all the relatives were very satisfied with the nursing care received by their patients; hence, the relatives indicated that the level of wellness of their patients was very good. Nevertheless, the relatives pointed out some areas that needed to be improved. These include; giving adequate and timely information to relatives regarding their patients, improving on patients’ feeding and cleanliness of Wards through frequent sanitation. Based on these observations, the researcher therefore recommended increase in supervision of activities by the Ward Managers and Supervisors, and encouragement of collaborative service between Nurses and Social Workers to promptly inform relatives over patients’ current information and wellbeing.