Nursing care at night: an evaluation using the Night Nursing Care Instrument.

INTRODUCTION: Night nurses carry overall nursing responsibility for approximately half the time that patients spend in hospital. However, there is a paucity of literature that focuses on nursing care provided at night.

AIM: The aim of this study was to evaluate nursing care provided at night from the perspective of both nurses and patients.

METHODS: The study, which had an evaluative and a comparative design, was carried out using the Night Nursing Care Instrument at a hospital in southern Sweden. Nurses (n = 178) on night duty were consecutively selected, while the patients (n = 356) were selected by convenience sampling.

RESULTS: The results showed a statistically significant difference between nurses' assessments and patients' perceptions of the nursing care provided at night in nursing interventions (P < 0.0001). In the areas of medical interventions and evaluation, no statistically significant differences were found between nurses and patients. For eight of 11 items, patients reported that they were satisfied (> or =80%) with the nursing care provided at night.

CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that night nurses need to improve their ability to assess patients' needs for nursing care at night. A first step in this direction is for them to become aware of how patients perceive night nursing. As a second step, nurses need to increase their knowledge of which nursing actions promote patients' rest at night.