Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Although there is no more propensity for measuring patient's satisfaction as an important qualitative scale of health services, the thing which is slightly seems to be forgotten is the attention towards the concept and expansion of theory framework. The purpose of this study is to remark the meaning of satisfaction and to offer a qualitative definition for that. This research is a qualitative study and content analysis. During the study period  fifteen patients who were hospitalized in Semnan hospitals (2009) were selected. The data were gathered by half-structured interview and analyzed. The results of this study shows four two major themes and four subthemes including feeling of satisfaction and the reception of nurses by patients. Accordingly, satisfaction is a calm sense that the patient feels it after the emotional and logical reception of nurses. The feeling will be sensed by intelligent and sometimes emotional feeling of patient towards the nurse in his/her care unit environment. The results of this study indicate the real and basic meaning of patient's satisfaction from nurses' views. This meaning is even beyond the imagination of experts and managers. These results can be put into work for designing suitable tools to measure the scale of patients' satisfaction of nurses based on their real perception.