Namibia survey links nursing satisfaction to technical care quality

Adult patients treated at two public health facilities in Namibia’s Kavango-East Region reported widespread dissatisfaction with nursing care in a cross-sectional study of factors associated with perceived care quality. Among 299 participants, satisfaction was significantly below the scale’s neutral midpoint, with a median score of 2.19, a mean of 2.50 and a standard deviation of 0.87. Overall, 63.2% of participants were dissatisfied. Nurses’ technical competencies showed the strongest statistical association with patients’ assessment of nursing-care quality, while access to health information was also significantly associated with the outcome.

Researchers used an online, modified Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire with 30 items to assess the care received by adult patients at the selected facilities. The final scale had a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.975, indicating excellent internal consistency within the study sample. The analysis combined exploratory factor analysis and descriptive statistics with one-sample Wilcoxon tests against the neutral midpoint, non-parametric group comparisons and Spearman correlations. The researchers also fitted a multiple linear regression with robust standard errors to examine the associations between eight predictors and perceived nursing-care quality. Analyses were performed in SPSS version 27.0.

Nurses’ technical competencies had the largest reported regression coefficient among the eight predictors, at β = 0.369, with p < 0.001. Patients who assigned higher ratings to nurses’ technical performance also tended to assign higher ratings to the overall quality of nursing care. The regression model explained 71.6% of the variance in perceived nursing-care quality, with F(8, 286) = 90.02 and p < 0.001. This model-level result applies to the surveyed population and does not establish that changes in technical performance would cause satisfaction ratings to rise.

Access to health information was the other domain that reached statistical significance in the model, with β = 0.208 and p = 0.045. Involvement in decision-making had a similar reported coefficient, β = 0.214, but its result was borderline rather than statistically significant at p = 0.051. That value did not meet the study’s conventional 0.05 threshold, so the evidence was inconclusive rather than evidence of no association. Nurses’ affective support and the sociodemographic variables included in the analysis were not significantly associated with perceived nursing-care quality, with all reported p-values greater than 0.05.

The study provides an empirical assessment of patient-satisfaction domains in Namibia and identifies technical competencies, access to health information and involvement in decision-making as the variables most closely connected to perceived nursing-care quality. The authors described these domains as practical targets for improvement in resource-constrained public facilities, while emphasizing that intervention studies would be needed to test their effects. Important constraints limit the findings: only 299 adults were recruited, the participants came from two facilities in one region, and recruitment combined convenience sampling with sex quotas. In addition, the cross-sectional design identifies associations rather than causal effects and cannot establish the direction of influence. The results therefore describe relationships measured among these patients at these facilities, not a nationwide estimate or a tested intervention outcome.

Subject of Research: Patient satisfaction with nursing-care quality in two public health facilities in Namibia’s Kavango-East Region

Article Title: Factors associated with patients’ satisfaction with quality of nursing care in Namibian public health facilities: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Tomas, N., van Rensburg, G. H., & Matlakala, M. (2026). Factors associated with patients’ satisfaction with quality of nursing care in Namibian public health facilities: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05538-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05538-3

Keywords: Namibia, nursing care, patient satisfaction, technical competencies, health information, decision-making, public health facilities, Kavango-East, cross-sectional study, Factors, associated, patients