This paper will present some of the findings of a qualitative study that utilised grounded theory to discover nurses perceptions of quality and factors that affect quality nursing care provided to Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA) patients in a large Queensland Metropolitan Hospital. The study used focus group interviews, participant observation, in-depth interviews and published literature to gather data. Fifteen registered nurses from a Cardiac Investigations Unit and twenty registered nurses from a Coronary Care Unit participated in the study. The results of this study showed that participants perceived quality nursing care as a complex concept. It comprised of basic, personal and application standards. The highest quality of nursing care was perceived to be achieved when nurses combined basic standards with personal standards, which later became the core concept of application standards. These three standards represented the nurse-patient relationship, when both nurses’ and patients’ expectations of care have been achieved. This study also identified a range of conditions that affect the provision of quality nursing care for elective PTCA patients, however these will not be presented in this paper. This study recommended that nurses develop strategies to provide innovative ways in which to overcome the conditions that reduce time available for conducive nurse-patient relationships and to achieve the marriage of expectations.