Medical Ethics
Year:2012 | Volume:6 | Issue:19|Papers Count:10

Patients’ protection is a key concept of the nursing ethics that assist in the maintenance of the patients’ autonomy and their decision-making. The nurses’ perception of this matter is effective in the occurrence of the protective behavior toward the patients and this study aims at measuring the nurses’ perception in this respect. The data of this descriptive-analytical study were collected per quotas from among 385 nurses in 4 educational hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Science by using a researcher-made questionnaire and were analyzed in two descriptive and analytical levels by using SPSS software. The results show that the average nurses’ perception of their protective role toward patients is relatively positive. Nevertheless, the necessity to find ways for the increase of the nurses’ perception in this regard seems necessary noting the importance of the patients’ rights.

The patients’ rights include all care cases that the patients are entitle to receive them. Considering the increasing importance of this issue and its effect on the improvement of treatment results and clients’ consent, this study was performed aiming at the exploration of the extent of observation of patients’ rights in physiotherapy clinic of the Faculty of Rehabilitation of Tabriz University of Medical Science in 2011. In this study, the patients or those accompanying the clinic’s visitors answered some questions on the status of the clinic’s performance in observing various aspects of the patients’ rights. These aspects were explored: selection of the service provider, power enjoyment, respect, safety, prevention and access were identified as having improper performance scores. However, communication and interaction, continuity of service, quality of primary facilities and resources, timely and immediate attention and trust had proper performance scores. Data results also showed that there was no meaningful relation between the total performance score and any of demographic variables (P>5%). But in the analysis related to the relation between demographic variables having different dimensions of performance, the relation between the age variable with the service continuity, being aboriginal or non-aboriginal with the access and the education status with having power and timely and immediate attention showed a meaningfuldiscrepancy (P<5%). Aspects of improper performance toward the patients’ rights in the studied center represent the existence of improvement in this areas and the need to the authorities’ effective attention and action.

Patients are the most vulnerable social groups exposed to the risk. The patients’ rights are part of human rights and are considered as a sensitive field for the medical groups and the patients. But unfortunately, in some cases we see that the staffs of the educational treatment centers do not observe them. The extent of the observance of the patients’ rights has been explored in this study. This study is a descriptive and cross-sectional one. The study settings are Besat, Shahid Beheshti and Sina educational-treatment centers of Hamadan city and the research sample includes 200 inpatients of these centers. The means for collecting data was a questionnaire which consisted of 2 parts: demographic characteristics of the research units and questions to obtain the patients’ opinions on the observation of their rights.In the patients’ opinions, their rights are most observed in respect of their admission (62%) and least observed in respect of the informed study and signature of the letter of consent (42.5%). Considering that generally 46% of the patients have this attitude that their rights are not completely observed, the effectiveness and quality of the healthcare should be maximized by training the medical staff and taking into consideration the fundamental rights of the patients and raising their awareness of their rights.

Observing the patients’ rights is a criterion of the effectiveness of patients’ satisfaction from the health-treatment services. The present study was performed aiming at “exploring the extent of the nurses’ awareness of the patients’ rights in an educational hospital of Tehran”. This descriptive, cross-sectional study was performed in 2010 and 156 nurses were selected by a random method. Two-section questionnaire was used to collect data. The questionnaire after being prepared and the determination of the reliability and … was distributed between units under study and afterwards, data were analyzed by SPSS version 15 and descriptive and inferential statistics. 58.33%, 39.10% and 2.56% of the nurses enjoyed good, medium and weak levels of awareness respectively. There was a meaningful relation between the awareness and working record (P=0.008%) and the simultaneous working at public and private hospitals (P=0.01%). The highest level (95.51%) of the nurses’ awareness was in the area of “privacy right and ensuring the confidentiality of data” and its lowest level (33.97%) was in the area of “the right to receive necessary information on the group under treatment, amounts of tariffs and insurance cover.” There are shortcomings in the execution of the “Charter of Patients’ Rights” in this hospital and it is necessary to promote the level of nurses’ awareness of the patients’ rights and serious devices and solutions should be considered to increase it.

Background and Objectives: Nurses are obliged to try for the promotion of methods to access the safe, desirable and qualitative healthcare. The professional obligation and conscientious conflict in the nurses cause a troubled conscience. The nurses’ experiences of their reactions to the behaviors for and against conscience may help to understand the meaning of conscience’s reaction.Materials and Methods: The phenomenological research was performed by the participation of 9 volunteer clinical nurses. The structureless interviews were recorded simultaneously and then transcribed. The Coalizzi method was used to analyze the data. The accuracy of the data was verified by using creditability, confirmability, reliability and transferability measures.Findings: by the continuous analyzation of data and analyzing the handwritings obtained from the interviews on the nurses’ experiences and beliefs about the conscience reaction, the tranquility contents including tranquility, gladness and consent subclasses and the subclasses of troubled conscience including sense of guilt, discomfort, mental engagement and worrisomeness and contents of reaction including subclasses of expressiveness, compensation and lack of repeat emerged.Conclusion: The nurses, in their experiences, expressed calmness and gladness when performing works conformed to conscience and showed discomfort and conscience trouble when performing works against conscience and tried to compensate a practice against conscience.

The experiences have shown that informing the patients and engaging them in the decision-making for treatment and respecting their rights will accelerate their improvement and diminish their period of stay at the hospitals. Evidences demonstrate that despite the efforts by the physicians and other staff of the health and treatment department and notwithstanding benefiting from the resources, the extent of patients’ discontent and complaints is increasing and one of its causes is the failure of physicians and nurses in establishing relations with the patients. This descriptive research was performed by a cross-sectional method in March 2011. In this study, 150 inpatients in gynecology and obstetrics, internal medicine I, internal medicine II, surgery and cancer departments of Shahid Sadoughi hospital of Yazd who had been hospitalized for more than one day were selected by the random sampling method. The results concerning the observation of each paragraph show that the personnel always observed paragraphs 1, 3 and 6 almost 50% respectively. It is interesting that paragraphs 2, 4 and 9 had not occurred for almost 60% of them and 46 patients (31.5%) reported that the paragraph 3 was rarely observed by the personnel. Generally, the most amplitude concerned the reception of honorable treatment. To sum up, considering performed explorations, the following solutions are recommended: informing the personnel of the importance of observing the patients’ rights, informing the patients of their rights through the personnel and the media, planning the hospital’s management in legal respect which is less observed, more cooperation of the personnel and the patients with each other, following up the breaches of patients’ rights and ratification of acts for ensuring the observance of patients’ rights and monitoring the enforcement of these rights to promote the patients’ consent from the health-treatment services and the increase of the medical staff’ s attention to the observation of patients’ rights.

Noting the patients’ dignity has expanded more during last decades and has appropriated many debates. Maintaining the patients’ privacy is a most important element in respecting their dignity. Although respecting the humans’ dignity is among the fundamental objectives of the system providing healthcare and medical services, but the studies show that the patients’ privacy and therefore their dignity are not well protected. In addition, the medical and nursing staffs are not well aware of the importance of the patients’ privacy and dignity and they have different understandings of these concepts too. Therefore, it is necessary to provide solutions to promote and protect the dignity in the clinical settings. This study discusses different aspects of the relationship between patients’ privacy and their dignity and deals with the findings of some studies performed in this respect.

Introduction: Medical students should be aware of their beliefs and attitudes, since the professional behaviors are acquired and learned. The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes concerning abortion among Medical Students’ in Golestan University of Medical Sciences.Methods: In this descriptive analytical study in 2010, 244 of the students based on randomized sampling were selected.The data collected by a valid and reliable questionnaire. The variables such ethnicity, and marital status also measured. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and analytical.Results: The average age of the students were 20.45 years old (SD =3.03).59.4% of them were women and 91.4% (223) of them were single. In terms of ethnicity 50.4% (123) were Fars, 36.1 % (88) Turkmen, and 13.5% (33) were from other ethnic groups. The analysis using Mann-Whitney test showed there was a significant relationship between average score of attitude with gender of the students (P=0.003). The total average score of attitudes of female students were 3.33 (SD: 0.56) and 3.07 (SD: 0.68) for the male students Conclusion: Although in this study, a few of the students had positive attitude to abortion, however is not possible to offer a value judgments. The variables showed gender as influential one. Having professional framework for the moral judgments would be effective on right decision making of health care providers.

Nowadays, ethics in the public health is a very important and fundamental issue in the area of public health and the research in the field of health. There is a major difference between the ethics in the public health and the medical ethics. The society is more noticed in the public health, while the patients’ rights have priority in the medical ethics.In this paper, it has been tried to examine the ethics in the interventions of health system, ethics in the systems, health organizations and ethical codes in this area. The ethical considerations of the health system including political acceptability, justice, social participation and confidentiality have been mentioned. Also, the 12 ethical codes of the health organizations have been raised. Discussing and being informed of the ethical codes are necessary for the policymakers, planners and providers of health-treatment services.

Introduction: By observing the effect of telomere and telomerase systems on the prolongation of the cells’ lives and in the laboratorial models this hypothesis has been raised that perhaps the aging of cells may be prevented and consequently the life prolongation may be realized by using this system; but this would be followed by a very complicated issue.Materials and Methods: changing in the model of aging occurrence and therefore death has brought about the changing of the population pyramid and has required the necessity of a special systemization in the health budgets, allocation of resources, training of human resources, caring, etc. The occurrence of aging among the members of the society, in case of being followed by non-dying has wide implications and will affect the whole social, economical and appraisal system of the society on a large scale.Findings: Occurrence of aging followed by death has played a decisive role in the life and the regulation of social relations, in its general sense the distribution of social power and wealth sources. Therefore, the uncommon increase of life span will transfer the total social relations to new unknown frameworks.Conclusion: Now, there are particular abilities in the medicine and peripheral sciences for the life longevity, but it also raises labyrinthicand multi-layer concerns about the issues after the meaningful longevity such as the transformation of the group enjoying longer lives into a special and perhaps outstanding and superhuman species.