The Relationship of Nurses’ Professional Commitment with Patient Safety and Patient Satisfaction at a Malaysian University Teaching Hospital

@#Introduction: Professional commitment encompasses affirmation of profession goals and values and a strong sense of profession loyalty. Nurses’ professional commitment is important as nurses represent the majority of healthcare professionals. Nurses play an essential role in maintaining patient safety and offering high care quality. This study aimed to examine the relationship of nurses’ professional commitment with patient safety and patient satisfaction about care quality in the Malaysian healthcare context. Methods: A cross-sectional design with a questionnaire was adopted using pairs of nurse and in-patient from a Malaysian university teaching hospital. The questionnaire measuring nurses’ professional commitment from Meyer and Allen’s organizational commitment scale was used. The nurses’ questionnaire also incorporated the Teng, Chang and Hsu’s patient safety scale of six adverse actions to assess the patient safety level among nurses. The questionnaire for patients utilized the Service Quality Scale by Teng, Shyu and Chang to measure the patient satisfaction about care quality. Using the online survey channel to administer the questionnaires, 170 questionnaires were filled by nurses and this was matched by 170 questionnaires being completed by patients. Pearson correlation coefficient was used for the analysis. Results: The results show that nurses’ professional commitment has a positive relationship with the patient satisfaction (r= 0.225, p= 0.003) while no significant relationship was found between nurses’ professional commitment and patient safety. Conclusion: Efforts could be made to incorporate elements of professional commitment into nursing quality training programs. Managing patient safety and service quality across ward specialties may require tailoring of service provision aspects in line with different levels of patient care needs and complexity.