Awareness of community health nurses on legal aspects of health care

Abstract

The study on awareness of community health nurses on legal aspects of health care was conducted to analyze the nurses knowledge on the laws related to the health care. Health care laws serve as a hallmark in maintaining the equilibrium in the delivery of health care services. It goes without saying that this particular field of activities calls for a sound technical and legal knowledge. In the current scenario the nursing service is widened and deals with various issues on legal aspects of health care. To keep abreast with such developments and to face the changing challenge, it is essential that the nurses are equipped with updated knowledge on laws related to health care. This will enhance safe health care delivery in an unbiased standardized way. Therefore this study was conducted to determine the awareness of nurses in public health sector on legal aspects of health care. Using nonexperimental descriptive research design, with the objectives 1. To determine the level of knowledge on legal aspects among nurses, 2. To associate the level of knowledge score of nurses with the variables such as (a) age (b) academic education (c) work experience (d) exposure to in-service education. Comparing the private and government health care sectors, the government health centers has meager turnover of nurse than the other private health care centers. Thus the consistency of the samples would be maintained. Via convenient nonprobability sampling technique 180 community health nurses were selected as samples. To measure the awareness of nurses’ knowledge on legal aspects, the researcher developed a questionnaire after a wide search of literature and with the experts’ opinion. The syllabus of the student nurses was also perused. The content validity, the reliability of the tool was measured using Test and Retest method. Generally health care system is governed by the laws, rules, regulations and other jurisprudence that cover a wide range of legal concerns, from healthcare law, mental health, public health, technology and medical care, to medicine, and the entire healthcare field, including specific laws governing the health industry: physicians, nurses, hospitals and health systems, health maintenance organizations, health insurers,managed care companies, nursing facilities, home care providers, social services and the relationship among them and patients. So, to cover all the aspects of health care laws, the investigator classified the legal aspects into four headings, they are 1.Sources of Law. 2. Laws on Health care Personnel. 3. Laws on Information management and 4.Laws of Protection in health care sector. The study revealed that among the nurses in the assessed public health care areas, only 11.7% nurses had the expected adequate level of knowledge on Legal Aspects of Health Care while the remaining 88.3% nurses had a moderate level of knowledge.Therefore, the result shows that nurses have moderate knowledge on legal aspects of health care, and they need more enhancement of knowledge through continuing nursing education and by maximum utilization of the library.