Background

Modern hospital care should ostensibly be multi-professional and person-centred, yet it still seems to be driven primarily by a hegemonic, positivistic, biomedical agenda. This study aimed to describe the everyday practices of professionals and patients in a coronary care unit, and analyse how the routines, structures and physical design of the care environment influenced their actions and relationships.

Methods

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted over a 16-month period (between 2009 and 2011) by two researchers working in parallel in a Swedish coronary care unit. Observations, informal talks and formal interviews took place with registered nurses, assistant nurses, physicians and patients in the coronary care unit. The formal interviews were conducted with six registered nurses (five female, one male) including the chief nurse manager, three assistant nurses (all female), two cardiologists and three patients (one female, two male).

Results

We identified the structures that either promoted or counteracted the various actions and relationships of patients and healthcare professionals. The care environment, with its minimalistic design, strong focus on routines and modest capacity for dialogue, restricted the choices available to both patients and healthcare professionals. This resulted in feelings of guilt, predominantly on the part of the registered nurses.

Conclusions

The care environment restricted the choices available to both patients and healthcare professionals. This may result in increased moral stress among those in multi-professional teams who work in the grey area between biomedical and person-centred care.

Background

Standardized patient surveys are widely used for assessing quality of healthcare from the patient perspective. An important purpose of such surveys is to identify disparities in care among different patient groups. The purpose of this study was to 1.) evaluate aspects of the validity of the adapted Swedish version of the Picker Patient Care Experience -15 (PPE-15) survey and 2.) examine the explanatory value of various socio-demographic and health characteristics in predicting patients’ care experiences.

Methods

A retrospective cross-sectional study design was used. Patients discharged from internal medicine wards at regional and university hospitals in different parts of Sweden during 2010 were invited to participate in the regularly administered national care-experience survey for hospital care. The internal validity of the PPE-15 was assessed with Cronbach’s alpha and item-scale correlations. Pearson product–moment correlation coefficients were used to compare PPE-15 total scores with overall care satisfaction ratings and Spearman correlation coefficients were used to compare PPE-15 total scores with various patient characteristics. Multiple linear regression analysis was performed to examine the influence of various patient characteristics on PPE-15 scores.

Results

The response rate was 66% (n = 34 603). Cronbach’s alpha was 0.87. The correlation between the PPE-15 total score and overall care satisfaction was high (0.62, p < 0.0001). Good self-rated health (SRH) and having Swedish as native language were associated with better care experiences and poorer experiences with greater healthcare utilization, higher age, functional impairment and being female. All examined characteristics, except language, were significant predictors in the regression model and SRH was the strongest predictor; however, the model explained only 7% of the total variance. Vulnerable patients (i.e. poor SRH and functional impairment) reported significantly less positive care experiences than did non-vulnerable patients (mean PPE-15 score 75 vs 85; p < 0.0001).

Conclusions

Our results supported the internal validity of the Swedish adapted version of the PPE-15. The explanatory value of the examined patient socio-demographic and health characteristics was low, suggesting the need for exploring other patient-related determinants of care experiences. Our findings also suggest a care paradox: patients in greatest need of hospital care are least satisfied with the quality of the care they receive.