I am going to do my research in the Queen Elizabeth hospital. The purpose of my research is to find out and compare the satisfaction levels of patients and nurses, the research will be carried out on a surgical ward.

Aims of research

* The min aims of the research are to research how long patients have to wait to be seen, and how many times they are seen in an hour.

* Find hot how long they had to wait for their operation and how long they have been in hospital for.

* Compare the satisfaction levels between patients and nurses.

* Find out if patients satisfied with treatment and medication.

To carry out the research I am going to use primary and secondary data. For the primary data I am going to give patients self-completion questionnaires to patients and nurses, which will be quantitive as most questionnaires are designed to collect quantitive information, but I will have to use structured interviews on patients who are unable to fill in the questionnaires themselves.

The advantages of using a questionnaire are; they give a chance to collect information from a large sample, and it is fairly cheap to reproduce and distribute large numbers of questionnaires. Some people like doctors and nurses may be more willing to fill in a brief questionnaire than give up time for an interview. The disadvantages of using a questionnaire are that questionnaires often attract a low response rate and poor response rate may be due to bad questioning design.

I will also use secondary such as previous research or statistics from books, internet and newspapers. I gained access to the informants by doing a work experience placement on the ward where I could carry out the research with the patients.

Before carrying out the research I predict that the questionnaire results will show that the satisfaction of nurses will b lower compared to the satisfaction levels of patients on the ward. I predict this because when I first started work experience on the surgical ward the patients were generally satisfied with their treatment, but the nurses seemed less satisfied and complained more about their work.

Task E3: Ethical issues

When doing the research I will take special account of those people who:

* Have different cultures or languages

* Have sensory impediments

* Have difficulty with reading and writing

* Are not motivated to speak or use information

I shall also be aware of the need for autonomy, non-malefience, honesty and interegrity. This shall be done by making sure participants have freely given their consent to involvement in the research investigation and before participants consent to this I shall make sure they have a full understanding of what the research involves. They must be aware of the aims of the research and of any risks and of any risks they can encounter when taking part in the research. This will involve explaining what will happen and weather they will take pert in the research.

All participants will have a right to withdraw from the research investigation at any time or refuse to answer any question asked and remain anonymous and have their data protected and also any harm that could effect the participants because of the research. The final ethical point is concerned with the standard of behaviour and integrity of researchers, I will do this by gathering data carefully, reporting results honestly and any problems, errors or distortions are acknowledged.

Other ethical issues to be aware of when carrying out the research:

* Age - is the child too young to understand the consequences of the decision

* Mental state - might a person with a mental illness be too confused or forgetful to make their own decision

* Learning difficulties - these may have bearing and a client's ability to make some decisions.

* Mental disorders - this might distort the clients viewpoint and impair their ability to make some decisions.

This will also be done by consulting users, their carers, community groups and those who provide services, about content and style of the information. I will also say at the end of the questionnaires that 'all information given will be confidential'.

Task E4: Questionnaires (see appendix 2 for questionnaires)

I designed three types of questionnaires then out of them I chose the one I thought was the best. I made five copies of this questionnaire and gave it out to people to give suggestions about how to improve it; this is called a pilot questionnaire.

The reason I used a pilot questionnaire was so that if there was any problems with any questions that patients did not want to answer then the questionnaire could have been changed before the research was carried out to make the research more reliable and easier for the patients to answer the question.

Improvements made

. In question six 'have you been in hospital before' I could asked after 'how long were they in hospital for', 'are they in for the same reason as before' from finding out this I could make more accurate conclusions.

2. When answering question eight 'are you satisfied with the medication you receive' participants wanted to say how they wanted to improve this, so I added another question 'if no how would you like to improve this'.

3. I also included a little thank you note at he bottom of the questionnaire.

I created the questionnaires by using questions that are relevant tot the participants and nurses and also by trying not to use question that would offend them in any way or make them not want to answer any questions.

Analysis

From carrying out the research you can see from looking at both results for nurses and patients that All the nurses were female and most of the nurses who had children worked 40-50 hours a week and had only been there for 0-12 months, which shows that they are over worked and are having to look after their children and also they have not worked at the hospital very long which may suggest they are inexperienced and this could be effecting their work and they would also have their families to look after. Also only four out of ten nurses said that they had been in hospital before so many of them do not know what's its like to be treated in hospital and can be unaware of how a patient is feeling and the worries they have but yet all nurses that the level of treatment the patients receive is satisfactory even though they have not been in hospital before they agreed to this.

From looking at the results for patients you can see that 40% of the participants were male and many of them were looked after by a female nurse, which may have made them feel uncomfortable or uneasy and may have preferred a male nurse. But many of the patients and nurses were around 40-50 years, so they would have been more understanding to each other as many of them were the same age. Also many of the patients were only in hospital for 0-7 day so they were only staying short term and would be going soon. Also all 15 participants had been in hospital before but only eight said the care they receive was what they expected and nine said they were unsatisfied with the care they receive but all nurses said they were satisfied with the care patients receive.

When asked what they wanted improved the patients said; quality of food, attitudes of nurses towards patients and for nurses to explain more about their treatment and medication. But when nurses were asked there was no suggestion for improvement as they said the level of care was satisfactory which indicates that the nurses have different ideas of what satisfactory is compared to the patients. When asked about how long patients had to wait for a bed many said 1-2 weeks and also many nurses agreed with this, so this was the only similarity between the patients and nurses.

Conclusion

From now having done the research you can see that what I predicted in task E1 that the satisfaction levels of nurses would be lower than the patients satisfaction levels did change but it was hard to tell as from the results, but eight patients said the treatment was un satisfactory but all nurses agreed that it was satisfactory so from looking at my prediction you can see that I was wrong and the results were the opposite to what I predicted in the introduction.

From looking at the aims of the research you can see that I fulfilled most the aims, but maybe I could have done this in more detail by adding more questions that were relevant to the aims so there were more valid conclusions. The first aim was 'to research how long patients have to wait to be seen in an hour' this aim was not fulfilled as there was a lack of time when carrying out the research but over all this did nit affect the results or reliability of the research, and all other aim were completed and the research was done on time.

Evaluation

The difficulties I came across when carrying out the research was that there was not enough time to get as many participants to fill in a questionnaire as I would have liked, which could have caused the research to be less accurate. Other difficulties were gaining permission to interview patients on the ward as I was unable to interview certain patients, also many nurses were too busy to be interviewed but when I did manage to interview nurses the questionnaire was rushed and they went for the first answer on the questionnaire. Patient also did not want to answer some questions, which they felt were private, this made the research difficult as there were some questions missed out and also not enough time to interview any more participants which could make the research unstable.

The research could have been improved by improving my questionnaire more so that they questions went into more detail so I could gather more information to justify the results. Also having more time to do the research so all the aims were fulfilled, and also making my research more wide spread like comparing this against another ward so I could have gathered more information and then the research would have been more reliable and also having more participants would have made the research more valid.

Task A

From carrying out the research I found out general satisfaction levels for patients and nurses and from comparing these, the differences between patients and nurses. Also how patients wanted the wards to be improved and what could be done to improve them, and also general attitudes of nurses towards patients and how they felt the ward could have been improved.

The research could have been improved by making the questionnaires more detailed so there could be more data to back my research and therefore it would have been made more valid so it would have been able to be reciplicated by another researcher. This could have been done by going into more depth with questions also getting more participants to take part in the research then I could have collected information from different wards and compared the results and made more reliable conclusions from this so if another researcher was to repeat the research there would be a wider variety of results to compare and wards to carry out the research.

When carrying out the research I chose a quantitive methodology. I chose this method because when carrying out research on a hospital ward I would have had to use questionnaires as they were quick and I would have had more chance of getting nurses to take part in the research, and when using questionnaires a quantitive methodology would have been the best method to use as the data is easy to analyse and easier for patients to understand and also saves time as when using questionnaires I only had to spend about 5 minutes with each participant. But if I was using a qualitive methodology I would have had to spend around 15-20 minutes with each participants and therefore I would not have had time to collect enough data and would not have got any nurses to take part in the in the research so then my research would not have been reliable or valid. So when carrying out the research I felt that I used the best method that was appropriate when carrying out the research on a hospital ward.

Bibliography

. Walsh and De Souza (2000) Advanced vocational health and social care Collins

2. Moonie (2000) advanced health and social care Heinemann

3. Social Trends

Appendix 1

Appendix 2