Primary nursing and patient compliance in a hemodialysis unit.

In this article, the patient compliance of 29 incenter hemodialysis patients before, during, and after the implementation of primary nursing is described. Although it was expected that primary nursing would improve patient compliance by virtue of improving the continuity of care on the unit, it was found that compliance rates did not increase after the implementation of primary nursing. It is possible that primary nursing has no effect on patient compliance, but it is impossible to make this generalization until further work has been done to clarify ways of measuring both primary nursing and patient compliance.