Respecting patient's rights and expectation's of patients in hospitals of medical sciences university of Ardabil in 2012

The issue of patients’ rights has become the spotlight of attention over the two past decades. Expectations’ of patients from health centers and respecting their rights are of importance. This study was performed to evaluate respecting patients’ rights and expectations’ of patients in hospitals of medical science university of Ardabil. This study performed to determine the extent to which patient's rights and expectations’ are respected in hospitals of Ardabil when judged against national patients’ rights charter. Methods and Materials: A descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted on 200 hospitalized patients in three major hospitals of Ardabil University of Medical Sciences in 2012 (hospitals of Ardebil University of Medical Sciences; Imam Khomeini, Fatemi, and Bu-Ali hospitals). The sample of patients was distributed based on the ratio of the number of beds in each ward to the total number of beds in each hospital. Data were collected using questionnaire and interview at discharge time and analyzed through descriptive and analytical statistics methods, utilizing IBM SPSS Statistics 21 software. The results of this study have shown that; the overall adherence level to the patients’ rights charter was 50.69% and overall patients’ expectations was 85/5%. Levels of respecting and patients expectations to the factors “Communication with patients”, “Providing information for patients”, “Privacy”, “Access to good healthcare services”, “Free choice of services and the right of refusal”, “Right to have informed consent”, “Access to health education”, “Confidentiality of patients’ information” and “Handling of complaints” were (68.5%, 90%), (4.5%,74.46%), (56.37%,83%), (54%,88.5%), (19.12%,81.9%), (61.16%,87.6%), (64%,88%), (46.16%,82.6%) and (42.5%,93.2%) respectively. Respecting to the charter have significant differences according to sex and age, also there were significant differences between expectations, education, age and residency of patients (p<0.05). Our results show that adherence levels to the national patients’ rights charter in hospitals of Ardabil, were intermediate and low and patients expectations’ were high similar to other cities of Iran. Therefore for more satisfaction of patients, it seems necessary to increase personals and medical students’ knowledge about patients’ rights.