Nurse-Patient Dyads: Linking Nurse & Patient Characteristics to Outcome Lourdes Marie S. Tejero, PhD, RN	PDF File
University of the Philippines, College of Nursing Keywords: nurse-patient dyads, nurse-patient bonding, nurse-patient relationship, patient satisfaction, methods triangulation

Abstract

The patient’s sense of well-being, more importantly for the terminally ill, is nestled in the interaction between nurse and patient.The nurse and patient are no longer separate entities during the interaction, but a dyad.The outcome, i.e. patient satisfaction, ensue not from the characteristics of the nurse and patient per se but from the nurse-patient dyad.  The main goal of this study is to test the proposed theory asserting that the nurse-patient dyad mediates between nurse-patient characteristics and patient satisfaction. This research paper utilized methods triangulation. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques were employed to describe the phenomenon of the nurse-patient dyad. 

In the preliminary qualitative observations and interviews done by the author, there were 6 kinds of nurse-patient dyads that were identified in the medical-surgical units and ICU of the largest public tertiary hospital in the Philippines.The dyads are as follow: Procedural dyads, Query-response dyads, Mutually responsive dyad, Unilaterally unreactive dyad, Discordant dyads, Reconciled dyads. A follow-up study was done on this, wherein observations of nurse-patient interactions and interviews of patients and nurses were done not only in the clinical areas where data were previously gathered, but also in the pay wards. The dyads enumerated above are subsequently categorized into 4 main types of nurse-patient dyads namely Therapeutic, Task-oriented, Dysfunctional, and Conversational dyads.

It is reported in literature that interventions do not fully account for patient outcomes. It is
therefore posited in this study that the nurse-patient interaction, actualized as a dyad, impacts on patient satisfaction. The nurse-patient interaction as conceptualized in this study is an interplay of two factors, openness and engagement.  By openness is meant the willingness of the individual to manifest his/her own self, her personal characteristics, to the other.Engagement on the other hand entails action, participation, involvement in the interaction.