Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Nurses comprise the largest group of service providers in the health system and have a significant impact on health care quality; therefore, ethical practice is of greater importance in the nursing profession compared to other fields of care. The present study was conducted to evaluate patients’ views on nurses’ observance of professional ethics in training hospitals of Bushehr during 2015.

This was a descriptive cross-sectional study performed on 208 patients hospitalized in teaching hospitals of Bushehr selected by convenience sampling. The research instrument was a questionnaire including demographic characteristics and questions about ethics of the nursing profession. Validity and reliability of the data collection tool were approved. Data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA and Pearson’s correlation coefficient using SPSS version 18.

The results showed that 94.6 percent of the patients evaluated the nurses’ observance of professional ethics as good, 4.4 percent as moderate and 1 percent as poor. Moreover, no significant relationship was found between the independent variables of age, gender, marital status, education level and history of hospitalization ward in the patients, and their views on nurses’ observance of professional ethics.