Objective: To determine how patient experience with nursing care influence patient satisfaction with overall hospital services.

Design: This was a cross-sectional study.

Setting: Inpatients were consecutively recruited at the national hospital (with 2000 beds) in Shanghai, China.

Participants: The inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) hospitalized for 2 days or more; (2) able to read and understand Chinese; and (3) aged 18 years old or above. Patients with mental health problems were excluded. 756 patient surveys distributed among 36 wards were analyzed. The mean age of participants in the study was 57.7 (SD=14.5) and ranged from 18-80 years. Most participants were male (61.5%) and ever married (94.6%).

Primary and secondary outcome measures: Patient experience with nursing care, meaning the sum of all interactions between patients and nurses, was measured using the self-designed questionnaire, which was developed by patient interviews, literature analysis and expert consultation. The overall patient satisfaction question was measured with a ten-point response option ranging from 1-10.

Results: A linear relationship between the patient experience with nursing care and overall patient satisfaction was observed. The patient experience with nursing care was significantly associated with overall satisfaction in the crude model and in the adjusted models. Even after adjusting for 6 sociodemographic and 3 disease-related factors, the patient experience with nursing care explained 34.9% of the variation in overall patient satisfaction.

Conclusions: This study showed that patient experience with nursing care was an important predictor for overall patient satisfaction.

Eligible patients were invited to participate in the study. After informed consent was given, all data were obtained by trained investigators. Characteristics included in the hospital information system, such as gender, age, and diagnosis, were collected by checking the information system, while characteristics related to family income, literacy level and number of hospital admissions were assessed by interviewing patients and their family members. The timing of collecting the patients’ feedback may affect their response to the questionnaires because some of them may worry that negative appraisals about their hospital experience and satisfaction would affect the treatment and care they received during hospitalization, and thus they might be unwilling to provide negative feedback. To encourage the participants to respond frankly, the patient experience with nursing care survey and the overall patient satisfaction survey were taken on the patients’ discharge day, and the nursing staff did not administer the survey.