Ahmed Manal
Background: The responsibility for making sound decisions was never more critical. All nurses have responsibilities for planning patient care therefore; nurses must make effective decisions that affect groups of patients and other staff as well as their own actions.
Aim: The current study aimed to identify if there is dissonance between nurses actual and preferred decisional involvement and examine the effect of certain samples' characteristics such as age, gender, educational level and years of experience on actual decisional involvement among nurses in governmental and private hospitals.
Method and material: A non-experimental correlational research design was used. The study was conducted at two different health care sectors: private and governmental sector in Amman, Jordan. A convenience sample of 130 nursing managers and staff nurses completed a demographic form and the Decisional Involvement Scale.
Result: The data revealed that there were no correlation among age, gender, educational level, years of experience and actual decisional involvement among study sample. Nurses in the governmental hospitals had more decisional involvement than nurses in the private hospitals. Both managerial and non-managerial nurses need more participation in decision making than they already practice.
Conclusion: The study concluded that there was a dissonance in the actual and preferred decisional involvement between managerial and non-managerial nursing personnel. Only type of hospitals (governmental versus private) had relationship to the nurses' involvement in decision making in the study sample.
