In a study of the importance of patient evaluations to nurses, 194 staff nurses from three general hospitals answered a three-part questionnaire that dealt with carrying out doctors' orders, ward management, providing comfort and safety, record keeping, and observation and assessment. The nurses were asked how important they considered patient evaluations of their performance, how soundly based the patient evaluations could be, how often patients observed aspects of their task performance, and how successfully an intelligent patientmdash;without formal nursing trainingmdash;could perform nursing tasks. Nurses, it was found, viewed patient evaluation of some tasks as more soundly based than evaluation of other tasks. If she thought the patient could do the task with some success, the nurse was more apt to consider the evaluation sound; but, the most powerful factor to affect the soundness of patient evaluation was visibility of tasks to the patient.
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