Nurses' awareness regarding ethical and legal issues in critical care units

Abstract

Background: Ethical and professional values are universal rules of conduct that provide a practical basis for identifying what kinds of actions, intentions, and motives are valued. It is demonstrated in ethical codes and clarify nursing profession practices, such as the quality of professional care. Aim: of this study assess the nurses' awareness regarding ethical and legal issues in critical care units. Design: A descriptive exploratory research design was used to conduct this study. Setting: Emergency Hospital at critical care units, Mansoura University, Egypt. Subjects: A convenient sample of all available nurses (50) from both sex working in Critical Care Units, who provide direct patient care. Tools: Data were collected through using two tools; Tool (I) Self-Administrated interview Questionnaire, that include two parts; part I included demographic characteristics of nurses and part II included Self-Administered knowledge questionnaire. Tool (II) observational checklist to assess the level of nurses' practice. Results: More than half of the studied nurses had average level regarding their knowledge about ethical issues in critical care units. While the same percentage were incompetent related to their practice level about the professional nursing ethics. Conclusion: There were a highly significant positive correlation between total knowledge and practice of the studied nurses regarding ethical issues in Critical Care Units. Also, more than half of studied nurses were incompetent related to their total practice level about the professional nursing ethics. Recommendation: The necessity of providing critical care nurses with specialized training in ethical and legal problems. The study should be replicated on large sample and in different hospitals setting to generalize the results.