EVALUATING THE NURSE-CLIENT SERVICE ENCOUNTER: TESTING A MODEL (PATIENT SATISFACTION).
Contributors: University Of Rochester School Of Nursing.
Published: 1996
Number of pages: 269
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Health Sciences, Health Care Management.
Description: Evaluation of the service encounter is a routine practice for many businesses, focusing on employee-customer interactions and how they affect customer satisfaction. Within health care, this type of feedback from clients has been undervalued by many professionals and organizations. Linkages between the evaluation of customer satisfaction and professionally-defined quality evaluation processes are the exception. A new approach to customer evaluation is needed to establish commonalities among these two approaches enhancing the integration of their heretofore separate, but parallel, evaluations of service and care. One method with the potential to create this joint focus is service encounter evaluation.

This study sought to evaluate a previously untested model for simple service encounters proposed by Klaus (1985). In his model, each encounter consists of three levels (Congruence, Task Achievement, and Satisfaction) operating in a parallel fashion for each participant in the service encounter, agent and client. For the individual, the levels built on one another hierarchically. The client and agent could achieve the same or different levels in the same service encounter.

This study examined nurse and client descriptions of 57 health care encounters. Clients were university students seeking non-urgent care at the infirmary. Seven nurses participated. Content analysis of the interviews used the MCCA (Minnesota Contextual Content Analysis) program. This program had not been used in a health care application. Preliminary testing established client homogeneity and program utility for use in this setting. Using the over 100 emphasis scores generated by the program, interviews were compared across clients and nurses. Despite some program limitations, results indicated that the Klaus levels are evident in health care service encounters. Levels were more easily identified for the client than for the nurse. Relationships between client and nurse descriptions were also found, including areas of common and distinct focus. These will be used for future development of setting-specific encounter evaluation. Questions were raised about the unique features of the health care encounter, the professional as agent, and the interpretation of the model. Future research will focus on further specifying the model for use in evaluating service encounters in health care.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-09, Section: B, page: 5573.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER SCHOOL OF NURSING, 1996.

School code: 1242.