Ethics in healthcare: Knowledge, attitude and practices of nurses in the Cape Coast Metropolis of Ghana
Asare, Patience, Ansah, Edward W., and Sambah, Francis (2022) Ethics in healthcare: Knowledge, attitude and practices of nurses in the Cape Coast Metropolis of Ghana. PLoS ONE, 17 (2). e0263557.
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Abstract
Background: Nursing is a profession that care for personal and private aspects of people’s lives. Therefore, nurses need to know the basic ethical aspects of nursing which is integral in nursing practices. The purpose of the study was to describe the ethical knowledge, attitude and practice of nurses in the Cape Coast Metropolis of Ghana.
Method: A cross-section design was used to collect data from 264 nurses in three selected healthcare facilities in the Metropolis. A structured questionnaire was administered to all the categories of these nurses in the selected facilities. Frequency counts and multiple regression statistics were used to analyze the data.
Results: The results show 78% of nurses possess good ethical knowledge, 84% had a positive attitude, while 98% had good ethical practices. The results further show that nurses’ professional rank [F (1, 259), 2.35, p = .02] and academic qualification [F (1, 259), 2.67, p = .008] were significant predictors of their ethical knowledge and attitude, respectively.
Conclusion: Inadequate resources, poor set up of working areas and understaffing are the major barriers limiting the practice of good ethical standards among the nurses. The Regional Health Directorate, the Ministry of Health and the Managers in charge of the health facilities need to work together to eliminate these barriers as they have the potential to negatively impact quality healthcare delivery in the Metropolis.
Item ID: | 74356 |
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Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 |
Copyright Information: | © 2022 Asare et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Date Deposited: | 01 Jun 2022 09:04 |
FoR Codes: | 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4206 Public health > 420602 Health equity @ 50% 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4205 Nursing > 420505 Nursing workforce @ 50% |
SEO Codes: | 20 HEALTH > 2004 Public health (excl. specific population health) > 200499 Public health (excl. specific population health) not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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