Legal Awareness of Practicing Nurses Working in Selected Private Hospitals of Kerala

Abstract

This paper explored the knowledge on legal aspects in nursing practice among practicing nurses in Palakkad district Kerala. It identifies the perceived consequences of lack of legal awareness and relation of legal awareness with socio personal variables. There is high need for legal awareness among nurses because people are concerned over the occurrences of medical negligence, peoples' rights to health and Consumer Protection Act. The three components of health system are the patient; staff and provider all are in need of legally safe practice. The insurers are concerned over health insurances. Providers aim to reduce length of stay and provide better quality cost effective patient care. The nurses also need to protected from legal sue.  The possibility of errors, controversy over expected care and provided care, threat over autonomy, confidentiality can bring out medico legal issues. Hence the legal awareness is essential to guard oneself, other staff, hospital and above all the patient. This study employed a descriptive survey design. A sample of 100 practicing nurses were recruited based on simple random sampling technique from a population of 300 from selected hospitals. The tools used were the legal awareness questionnaire with 60 items of legal awareness, the perceived consequences consists of 10 item 3 point scale for answering three objectives and one hypothesis. The instrument was validated by a pool of experts and established test retest reliability using Carl Pearson coefficient of correlation at 0.8. The mean legal awareness was 33.48+4.7. It was concluded that the practicing nurses have less knowledge on negligence, malpractice, and fundamental concepts of Indian judicial system. The informed consent (3.8+1.3), Indian nursing Council act (mean 4.6+2.) were the areas scored high. There is strong positive correlation of legal awareness with  age  (r 0.78) and with nursing experience(r 0.82). The awareness increases as age and experience increases. The study recommended that the deliberate efforts to be initiated to raise the legal awareness of practicing nurses prevent medico legal issues and improve the quality of patient care.