Knowledge, attitudes, and practices toward legal issues among iranian nurses

Context: Nowadays, in view of improved patients’ awareness of their rights to receive safe and high‑quality services, many legal issues stand facing the nursing profession. With the aim of providing such services, nurses are thus required to unquestionably have a sufficient understanding of legal issues and professional/ethical/criminal laws specific to nursing, empowering them to protect themselves and their patients.

Aims: Purpose of this study was to investigate the knowledge, attitude, and practice of nurses toward legal issues.

Setting and Design: The present study is a cross‑sectional analytical study that was conducted in 2021 in 5 medical and educational centers of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. The study population included all nurses working in medical and educational centers.

Materials and Methods: The data collection tool was a questionnaire related to the status of knowledge and attitude and practice of nurses of legal issues.

Statistical Analysis Used: Pearson correlation coefficient (Pearson’s r) and multiple linear regression were utilized to establish the relationship between the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) scores and to identify the factors shaping these values, respectively.

Results: As well, the knowledge mean score was equal to 13.81 ± 1.32, and such values for attitudes and practices were 8.02 ± 1.62 and 24.15 ± 1.36, respectively. Significant relationships were also observed between gender, employment type, source of information, and attitude mean score, as well as gender and practices mean score.

Conclusion: Despite the satisfactory levels of KAP about legal issues as well as professional/ethical/criminal laws specific to the nursing profession among the Iranian nurses, there is still a need to broaden their knowledge of the relevant formalities in this domain.