Journal of

Background and Aim: Today provision of an adequate and appropriate health services depend on many factors. Human resources are one of the most important factors. Nursing managers with more exact understanding of nursing activity could prevent of human resource wastage. In other way goal achievement in an efficient remedial system depends upon favorite delivery services and one of the appropriate ways for quality of care evaluation is patient satisfaction measurement about care delivery. This study was conducted and implemented to measure the nursing care time and its relationship with patient satisfaction.

Materials and Methods: This descriptive and analytical study was done in internal ward in Gorgan 5th Azar educative and therapeutic center for one month. nursing activity checklist was used for measuring the time that spend for Nursing staff activity and patient satisfaction scale. Data were analyzed with SPSS for Windows package.

Results: In this research findings showed, 46.46% of nursing activity time was spent for direct care, 15.8% of total time was used for documentation activities and 22.5% of time spent for nurses' individual activity, whereas only 7.43 percent of total time was spend for patient assessments. 60.3% of patients were satisfied about care delivery and 24.8% of them had moderate satisfaction. A significant correlation was seen between patient satisfaction and nursing direct care (r =0.272, P= 0.001).By increasing The spent time for direct care, patients' satisfaction was also increased.

Discussion and Conclusion: Nursing managers' awareness from scientific methods of management, rules modification, use of new equipment and technology and also delegating of some nursing activity to nursing assistants could promote quality of care with increasing of nursing direct care.

Background and Aim: Over the past decade, the number of private centers providing health care services in Iran has had a continuous growth and the highly competitive market in private hospitals industry has caused increasing pressure on them to provide services with a higher quality. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of services being provided in private hospitals of Tehran as judged by patients.

Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2010 in Tehran. The study sample comprised 983 patients, randomly selected from 8 private hospitals. The survey instrument was the standard SERVQUAL questionnaire. Wilcoxon, t-test, and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used for statistical analyses.

Results: The total mean scores of patients' expectation and perception were 4.92 and 4.02, respectively. The highest figures were related to the tangible factors dimension and the lowest ones to the empathy dimension. The differences between the perception and expectation for all the 22 items and the 5 dimensions were found to be statistically significant(p< 0.001).

Conclusion: SERVQUAL is valid and reliable in hospital settings as a standard tool for the assessment of quality. The results of the present study have revealed the areas that need to be improved as far as the patients are concerned. Measuring the opinion of patients can help facilitate the provision of hospital services, and improve the quality of such services and patients' satisfaction.

Background and Aim: Self-reliance is a psychological belief that is formed in an individual during growth and is not changed easily and quickly.
The present study aims to evaluate the relationship between nursing managers' self-reliance and patients' satisfaction in hospitals affiliated to Tehran University of Medical Sciences(TUMS).

Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 400 individuals(200 nursing managers and 200 patients) were interviewed in various clinical wards of TUMS hospitals. Nursing managers' self-reliance and patients' satisfaction were evaluated using a structured questionnaire.
The data were entered into Stata 11 software and analyzed with non-parametric ANOVA and Spearman's correlation coefficient tests. The significance level was determined to be p<0.05.

Results: Of the nursing managers, 58(29%) were male and 142(71%) were female. The mean and SD of their self-reliance were 134.9 and 19.8, respectively. The patients, however, comprised 81(40.5%) males and 118(59.5%) females. The mean and the standard deviation of patients' satisfaction were 57 and 18.2, respectively the only individual factors affecting their level of satisfaction were educational level(p<0.005) and insurance status(p<0.0001). Besides, a multivariate analysis showed that there was a significant negative association between managers' self-esteem and patients' satisfaction(P=0.04).

Conclusion: The findings revealed that female managers had less self-esteem than male managers. Moreover, it showed that managers' higher self-esteem would cause patients' lower satisfaction. Furthermore, patients with higher education and/or with health insurance were more satisfied than others.

Background and Aim: The patient is the main customer for hospital services. Patient satisfaction can reflect if the services are performed correctly. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between the degree of client tribute plan and inpatients and outpatients satisfaction in Shiraz hospitals.
Materials and Methods: This descriptive-analytic and cross sectional study was done among 211 inpatients and 1,175 outpatients in 8 Shiraz hospitals. The instruments for data collection were two client tribute plan and patient satisfaction questionnaires. Data collected by interviews and observation. Data were entered into SPSS. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation test were used for data analysis.
Results: Forty five point four percent of patients and 44.1 percent of outpatients assessed the hospital service satisfaction as weak. The mean score of inpatient and outpatient satisfaction was 60.53±8.9 and 54.22±12.6 respectively. There were significant relationship between type of admission and satisfaction (p=0.001). Mean score of client tribute plan was 182.44±11.8 that placed in the appropriate level. There were no significant relationships between client tribute plan and inpatients and outpatients satisfaction (p=0.143).
Conclusion: Although client tribute plans perform properly, patient satisfaction is low. In this regard, it is recommended that review client tribute plan clients in healthcare systems and adopt its contents with the needs of patients.