SUMMARY
What is already known about the topic?
- Quality nursing care is a concept that attracted the interest of nurse professionals around the world.
- Quality of nursing care is a multidimensional concept which is difficult to define or measure.
- Patients and nurses hold different meanings in relation to quality nursing care.
What this paper adds?
- Despite the different understandings between nurses and patients two aspects of the care were found common, that is being cared for by competent nurses and addressing the patient’s needs.
- Contributes to the debate surrounding quality nursing care and fuels the concern for clarity, and accuracy in relation to the conceptualisation of the term.
- Quality nursing care is a context specific term, meaning that many variables deriving from contextual factors influence the way that patients and nurses view quality.