Communication between patients and nurses not only meets the
patients'' needs but also makes nurse-patient relationship
successful and positive. Nurses need to realize and complete the patients'' demands or needs accurately. In particular, emergency
room (ER) patients suffering from unexpected illnesses and
accidents have high psychological and physical anxiety. Also, the
emergency room is crowded with many different patients.
Because of this, it is difficult for patients to properly
communicate their needs in a complex and confusing emergency
room environment; nurses have limitations in properly recognizing
and fulfilling the patients'' demands. This study aims to investigate
the differences between the communication needs importantly
recognized by the emergency room patients and the nurse''s
communication requirement recognition, and the satisfaction of the
communication to establish a basis for increasing patients''
satisfaction.
After data collecting was approved by the Institutional Review
Board (IRB) of Chungnam National University, from April 2017 to
August 2017, questionnaires were distributed to and collected
from patients and nurses who agreed to the survey at a local
emergency medical center at a university hospital A. 64
questionnaires from patients and 26 from nurses, a total of 90
questionnaires were used for the analysis.
The research instruments of Pytel et al. (2009) were used for
this study after one Ph.D. of English Education and one master
translated the instruments in English into Korean and two
professors of Nursing Science reviewed them. The collected data
were analyzed by mean, standard deviation, t-test, and ANOVA
according to the purpose; patient-nurse communication needs and
communication satisfaction were compared by ranking.

The results of this study are as follows.
Firstly, the top priority of patient-nurse communication needs
importantly recognized by emergency room patients was related
to providing information. Emotional supports and sociocultural
needs were perceived as less important than others. Meanwhile,
the items that provide information to the patient in the
patient-nurse communication needs recognized by the nurse were
more important than the other items. Emotional supports and
sociocultural needs were less important than other items. Based
on this, it can be seen that the emergency nurses are well aware
of the communication requirements that the patients importantly
recognize.
Secondly, after analyzing the satisfaction of the patient-nurse
communication needs by the emergency room patients, such as
nurses'' immediate and clam responses to patients'' questions,
respect for patients, and usage of terms patients can understand,
the items of communication needs showed high satisfaction. Also,
according to the results of analyzing the nurses'' performance
satisfaction with the patient-nurse communication, in the items
such as responses to the questions to the patients'' levels and
respect for patients, the satisfaction level of nurses'' performance
was highly evaluated. The satisfaction for informative
communication needs in both groups of nurses and patients
recognized as important was significantly low in the group of
patients, on the other hand, intermediate in the group of nurses.
However, there is a difference between the two groups in that
the average score for communication satisfaction is higher for the
group of patients (3.09/5) than for the group of nurses (2.75/5).

The results shows that both groups of nurses and patients
significantly recognized the importance of the communication
needs in terms of providing information; however, there was a
difference between the two groups in the performance results of
the communication needs. Patients were less satisfied with the
needs they regarded as the most important and nurses showed
moderate levels of satisfaction. This indicates that patients and
nurses differ in the standards and expectations for communication
performance. Thus, it is important that emergency room nurses
should recognize the current situation in which the patients''
desired communication needs are not being met and they should
start to focus improvement effort and new directions of
emergency room care systems to meet the communication needs.