Understanding the effects of nurses on the process by which patients develop hospital satisfaction.

An understanding of the process by which hospital patients evaluate their nurses could be very useful. However, no theory-based model exists in the nursing literature to explain the relationship among patients' hospital rooms, locus of causality, patients' evaluation of nurses, and hospital satisfaction. This article proposes a model to help fill this void. It also presents empirical evidence supporting the model--a study finding that patients' evaluation of their hospital rooms and their perception of locus of causality affected their evaluations of nurses. The results suggest patients' evaluation of their nurses and rooms are two key variables that affect their overall hospital satisfaction. However, patients' evaluation of nurses appears to have a much greater influence on hospital satisfaction than does patients' evaluation of their rooms.