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The psychiatric patient's right to self‐determination: a preliminary investigation from the professional nurse's point of view
Author(s) -
VÄLIMÄKI M.,
HELENIUS H.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.69
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1365-2850
pISSN - 1351-0126
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2850.1996.tb00140.x
Subject(s) - nursing , intervention (counseling) , psychology , medicine , point (geometry) , psychiatry , geometry , mathematics
The aim of this preliminary empirical investigation was to explore the concept of self‐determination and to discuss its applicability to psychiatric nursing. The data were collected with a questionnaire submitted to professional nurses ( n =127) working on long‐term wards in four Finnish hospitals. Data analysis combined the methods of content analysis and quantitative statistics. A tentative concept apparatus was created in order to provide nursing science with a broader understanding of the issue at hand. Nurses identified various factors that act to restrict and to support self‐determination: the most common restrictive factor was the patient's illness or condition, and the most common supportive factor was nursing intervention. Views differed on the importance of self‐determination in the case of psychiatric patients; over half of the nurses described the right to self‐determination as very important. On the basis of the findings it is concluded that self‐determination is a valid concept for the psychiatric patient. It was also thought to serve the needs of education as well as evaluation.