Preventive Care in Nursing and Midwifery Journal

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  Background and Objectives: Patients’ rights are the patients’ expectations from health services. Patients’ rights declaration is to protect individuals’ rights in order to be ensured, in case of being sick they will receive enough qualified care in a respectful context regardless of their age, gender, and economic situation. The purpose of this study was to determine the level of nurses’ awareness from patients’ rights and the extent to which they respect such rights in Mashhad’s hospitals.

  Material and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study. The participants were 486 nurses who were selected based on the random simple stratified sampling . The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire including two main sections: 1) demographic information and 2) situational rights of the patients. Data were analysed in the SPSS.

  Results: The results of the study revealed that the level of awareness and the degree to which the nurses observe patients’ rights were at excellent level in more than 50% of the cases. The study also demonstrated that awareness and observation of the patients’ rights were not significantly correlated to age, experience, and educational level ( P>0/05) .

  Conclusion: According to the results of the study, observation of the patients’ rights were at excellence level in more than half of the cases however, regarding the importance of the issue in question, it is essential that policymakers set legislating rules which protect patients’ and nurses’ rights, so as to expect improvements in the quality of health and clinical services.

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Background: Informed consent is the cornerstone of medical ethics and is related to four out of ten articles
of the patient's legal charter, aimed at supporting the patient and clarifies ethical principles in the physicianpatient relationship.
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of receiving patients’ informed consent in the
surgical wards in Zanjan University of Medical Sciences.
Methods: In this descriptive cross-sectional study, all patients, admitted to surgical wards of public hospitals
in Zanjan, were selected through stratified random sampling method. Data were collected after admission
and before surgery, using a questionnaire designed according to library studies and considering Sheikh
Taheri et al.’s study in two sections: general and specific. Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used
to analyze the results. The content validity method was used to determine the validity, and the reliability of
the questionnaire was evaluated by internal reliability using Cronbach's alpha coefficient.
Results: The number of patients was 400 (211 males and 189 females) and their mean age was 33.78. The
results showed that 24% of the samples rated as “appropriate” the process of signing the consent form, and
19% of them considered the status of information submission appropriate. Three percent of the respondents
regarded the comprehensibility of the questionnaire, and 12% considered the voluntary nature of obtaining
the informed consent, as well as 19% found the relationship between the physician and the patient as
appropriate. Other findings revealed that there was no significant relationship between sex and marital status
with the sum of the questionnaire dimensions, but there was a significant relationship between the type of
hospitalization and how to submit information consent and the process of signing the consent form, and also
between the number of hospitalizations. Moreover, the type of job was found to be statistically significant
with the form signature process variable.
Conclusion: This study found that there were some shortcomings in the process of obtaining a surgical
informed consent. Therefore, considering the role of the patient in the process of obtaining informed consent,
providing sufficient information on physician’s treatment, training physicians and providing the patient with
the opportunity to choose the treatment method can be effective in improving the quality of obtaining an
informed consent.