After 1994 with the inception of the South African Democratic Government, the health care delivery system was one of the areas that had to be reviewed. The vehicle for a comprehensive health care system was based on primary health care which encouraged people and patients to take responsibility for their health by being involved in all aspects of their care. For this purpose the Batho Pele principles were introduced, a concept which is informed by 8 principles, namely: consultation, service standards, access, courtesy, information, openness and transparency, redress and value for money. These principles are meant to restore the dignity and the rights of patients which are paramount in the Constitution of South Africa. (Constitution of South Africa 108 of 1996 Chapter 2) The nurses claim that since the introduction of the Batho Pele Principles, patients and their families have been “impossible” towards nurses, making unnecessary and sometimes impossible demands. The nurses also experience patients and their families as being informed of their “rights” but not of their responsibilities as patients. They were also unaware of the rights of the nurses. The objectives of the study were:- To explore and describe the experiences of professional nurses working in the outpatient departments of the introduction of the Batho Pele principles in state hospitals, and to Recommend guidelines that will enhance better understanding and implementation of the Batho Pele principles by the professional nurses. The study is founded on a qualitative research paradigm based on explorative, descriptive and contextual framework. The data was collected from focus groups from each hospital of the Port Elizabeth Hospital Complex. Each group consisted of four to six willing participants all of them were professional nurses who have worked at least five or more years in the outpatient department of the Port Elizabeth Hospital Complex. Data was collected via semi-structured audio-taped interviews together with the researcher’s field notes. Data analysis was done using Tesch’s data analysis spiral. The assistance of independent coder reinforced the truth value of the findings. Themes and subthemes emerged from the data that was collected and revealed that the professional nurses experienced that the Batho Pele Principles as a good policy, but that it was difficulty to uphold due to inadequate planning of health services prior to implementation of the Batho Pele Principles. They experience not getting from their management and they also experience that there was lack of discipline in their institutions. Based on these findings, guidelines that will recommend better implementation of the Batho Pele Principles by nurses were compiled by the researcher and future research in this regard was recommended.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:10023 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Miza, Thenjiwe Mildred |
| Publisher | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Faculty of Health Sciences |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | v, 98 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University |
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