Knowledge and Practice of Nurses Regarding the Standards of Professional Nursing Ethics

 Observing the ethics of the nursing profession has an effective role in providing quality care. The present study was conducted to determine Knowledge and practice of nurses regarding the standards of professional nursing ethics.

 This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed in 2020 by 392 nurses from teaching hospitals affiliated with the Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences in Iran. Nurses were selected by the simple random sampling method and to collect data, two questionnaires were used to assess the knowledge and practice of nurses to comply with nursing ethical standards. Data were analyzed by SPSS software 16 and descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation, frequency) and inferential tests (correlation coefficient, regression). The Significance level was considered less than 0.05.

Ethical Considerations: 

To participate in the study, informed written consent was obtained from the participants. Necessary information was given about the nurses being free to participate and leave the study.

 The average knowledge of nurses about compliance with ethical standards (17.2±4.81) and their average performance was by ethical standards (130.88±9.11). Pearson correlation coefficient indicated a positive and significant relationship between nurses' knowledge and practice of adhering to ethical standards (P<0.05, r=0.65). The nurses' knowledge (R2=0.26) significantly predicts their performance in terms of ethical standards. The non-standardized beta value showed that the share of knowledge in predicting nurses' performance is (2.54). There was no significant relationship between the average knowledge and practice of nurses and demographic characteristics (P>0.05).

 The efforts of systems to improve the awareness of their nurses can play an influential role in improving their performance in line with ethical standards in the clinical environment. Continuous training programs can play an important role in sensitizing nurses in the face of ethical issues and therefore improve their performance according to ethical standards.