AWARENESS OF PATIENT RIGHTS AMONG PHYSICIANS AT AIN SHAMS UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS

Abstract

During the past few years, Egypt has implemented several diverse legal, political, and administrative mechanisms to deal with health care ethical problems. Despite major achievements, several problems persist, including unethical behavior of health care workers, inequity, and poor patient realization of self-empowerment In Egypt, the patient’s bill of rights was introduced into the Egyptian Hospital Accreditation standards, and was enforced in all hospitals across the country since 2005. This was aimed at providing high quality of care; increasing the productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and the satisfaction of the patient; and ensuring different dimensions of quality. The current study aimed at determining Physicians’ Knowledge, intention and Practice of patient's rights at Ain shams University Hospitals and to find out factors that affect Physicians’ awareness, intension and Practice of patient's rights. A Cross Sectional study involving a stratified random sample of 400 Resident Physicians were included based on results of a previous study finding carried out by Nejad et al, 2011 which revealed that that %58.33 of health care workers have good levels of awareness of patient rights. Resident Physicians were recruited from different departments at Ain Shams University Hospital. A Self Administered structured questionnaire was used to collect information about: 1- Personal data of study subjects including age, gender, primary work area or unit, Duration of work in the hospital, Duration of work in current hospital work area/unit, Work hours per day, staff position in the hospital. 2- General Awareness of patient rights. In addition, the patients will be asked whether or not they had participated in a clinical research study before, and if they had participated, whether or not they had given informed consent.