Patients’ satisfaction with psychiatric nursing care in Benin, Nigeria

Student summary

Why This Research Matters

Patient satisfaction is one of the clearest signals we have of whether nursing care is actually working for the person receiving it, and this study asked that question in a setting where the answer is rarely measured: a public psychiatric hospital in Nigeria. The researchers surveyed 185 patients at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Benin, Edo State, using a cross-sectional descriptive design. Patients were chosen through simple random sampling, and their average age was 36.3 years (plus or minus 10.1 years). The most common diagnoses among respondents were schizophrenia (40.0%) and depression (34.1%). Data were analyzed in SPSS version 21, and the researchers used the chi-square test to check whether satisfaction differed across groups, with statistical significance set at p < 0.05.

The headline number is a mean satisfaction score of 3.53 out of a possible range that ran from 1.6 to 5.0, with 0.69 as the standard deviation. Translated into simpler terms, just over half of patients (52.4%) reported being satisfied with the nursing care they received, while nearly half (47.6%) reported dissatisfaction. That is close to an even split, which is important: it means satisfaction was not universal, and a large minority of patients left their care experience unhappy with some part of it.

When the researchers looked at which specific aspects of care patients were unhappy with, three areas stood out. The biggest complaint was privacy: 61.1% of patients were dissatisfied with the privacy nurses afforded them. Close behind was a perception that nurses were not willing to respond to patients' needs (55.7% dissatisfied), and a related concern that nurses were not sufficiently aware of what patients needed in the first place (55.1% dissatisfied). On the positive side, patients were most satisfied with how nurses reassured their relatives (61.6% satisfied) and with nurses' general competence or capability at their job (60.5% satisfied). So the pattern that emerges is: patients trust that psychiatric nurses in this hospital are skilled and that they can put worried family members at ease, but many do not feel the nurses protect their privacy or truly notice and respond to their individual needs.

The study also found statistically significant differences in who was dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction was significantly more common among male patients than female patients, and significantly more common among patients diagnosed with depression or bipolar affective disorder compared with other diagnoses (p < 0.05 for both). The abstract does not give the exact size of these differences, only that they were statistically significant, so a nurse reading this should treat the phrase significantly more common as a signal to investigate further rather than as a precise number.

For a nursing student, the value of this study is less about the specific percentages and more about the mechanism it points to: quality of nursing care is described in the study as something that may influence whether people actually use mental health services at all. In other words, dissatisfaction with privacy or responsiveness is not just a customer-service problem — in a context where stigma and access barriers already keep people away from psychiatric care, poor experiences with the nurses who do see patients could reinforce avoidance of treatment. The authors situate this within a well-documented reality: many low- and middle-income countries, including Nigeria, face a shortage of psychiatric nurses and difficult working conditions, and the study frames its findings as a call for psychiatric nurses to become aware of exactly where patients feel let down, so that care can be optimized for the realities of their own settings.

Students should read the numbers with appropriate caution. This was one hospital, surveyed at one point in time, with a modest sample of 185 patients, so the findings describe this setting and cannot be assumed to generalize to all psychiatric units in Nigeria or elsewhere. Still, the specific, named gaps — privacy, responsiveness, and awareness of patient needs — are concrete, actionable targets that any psychiatric nursing team, in Nigeria or in Canada, could use as a checklist for self-reflection on their own unit's practice.

Faculty notes

Educational Relevance

This cross-sectional descriptive study by Omoronyia, Ndiok, Enang, and Obande, published in the International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences (2021), assessed patient satisfaction with psychiatric nursing care at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Benin, Edo State, Nigeria — one of two public mental health hospitals serving Nigeria's South-South region. The study is a useful teaching case for discussing patient-reported experience measures in a resource-constrained, low-middle-income country (LMIC) psychiatric setting, a context students rarely encounter in North American curricula.

Methodologically, the researchers used simple random sampling to recruit 185 inpatients or outpatients (the abstract does not specify the care setting explicitly), with a mean age of 36.3 ± 10.1 years. Schizophrenia (40.0%) and depression (34.1%) were the most common diagnoses among respondents. Analysis was conducted in SPSS v21 using chi-square tests to examine associations between satisfaction and patient characteristics, with alpha set at 0.05. The mean satisfaction score was 3.53 ± 0.69 (scale range 1.6–5.0), translating to a near-even split: 52.4% satisfaction prevalence versus 47.6% dissatisfaction prevalence. This is worth flagging in seminar: a near 50/50 split is a materially different finding than the high-satisfaction figures (often 70–90%) reported in many patient-satisfaction surveys, and instructors can use this to discuss how sampling, instrument wording, and cultural response patterns can shift satisfaction distributions.

The domain-level findings are the most pedagogically rich part of the abstract. Dissatisfaction clustered around three areas: privacy afforded by nurses (61.1% dissatisfied), nurses' willingness to respond to patient needs (55.7% dissatisfied), and nurses' awareness of patient needs (55.1% dissatisfied). Satisfaction clustered around nurses reassuring relatives (61.6% satisfied) and perceived nurse competence (60.5% satisfied). This split — high marks for technical competence and family-facing communication, low marks for privacy and individualized responsiveness — maps well onto known tensions in psychiatric nursing between task-oriented custodial care and person-centered, dignity-preserving care, and is a strong discussion anchor for units on therapeutic relationships, privacy/confidentiality, and person-centered mental health nursing.

The study also reports statistically significant subgroup differences: dissatisfaction was significantly more common among male patients and among patients diagnosed with depression or bipolar affective disorder (p < 0.05). The abstract does not report effect sizes, adjusted odds ratios, or confidence intervals, so instructors should caution students against over-interpreting the strength of these associations; the appropriate takeaway is that these subgroups merit closer qualitative or mixed-methods follow-up, not that gender or diagnosis causally determines satisfaction.

For appraisal exercises, this abstract is a good vehicle for teaching the limits of single-site, cross-sectional, self-report designs: no comparison group, no baseline/follow-up, unspecified instrument psychometrics, and unclear generalizability beyond this hospital and region. Supplementary background (not from the source itself) is useful context: the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Benin City was established in 1964 and has run a School of Psychiatric Nursing since 1969, making it a training as well as clinical site, which may itself shape patient experience through the presence of student nurses — a hypothesis the abstract does not test but which instructors can raise as a discussion prompt. The authors' framing — that quality of nursing care may influence uptake of mental health services in LMIC settings already characterized by nursing shortages and difficult working conditions — is a strong bridge to broader discussions of global mental health workforce policy and to comparing psychiatric nursing standards (privacy, individualized care planning) across health systems, including Canada's.