PATIENT NURSE COLLABORATION - A COMPARISON OF PATIENTS AND NURSES ATTITUDES IN FINLAND, JAPAN, NORWAY, AND THE USA

While there has been an increasing emphasis on patients' participation in decisions concerning health care and nursing in the literature as an ideal, it is not clear to what extent patients and nurses assume th e consumerist attitude regarding health-care decision making. With the view that attitudes people hold regarding their role in health care a nd nursing will primarily affect the way they behave in health-care si tuations, a multinational study was carried out to examine five sets o f attitudes regarding consumerism held by patients in acute-care hospi tals and nurses working in them. The findings from the surveys in Finl and, Japan, Norway, and the U.S.A. indicate that while the patients an d the nurses in these countries tend to lean toward the consumerist pe rspective in their attitudes, there were significant differences in th e acculturation of these attitudes among the countries and between the patients and nurses. Two different models for the explanation of atti tude regarding collaborative decision making in nursing practice emerg ed for the patients and the nurses as groups. For both groups, however , age and the more general consumerist attitudes have a bearing on the ir attitudes regarding collaboration in nursing.