Perceived Adherence to Professional Ethics and Associated Factors Among Health Professionals in Bale Zone Public Hospitals, Oromia Regional State, South-East Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: Currently, hospitals not only have to contend with the dynamics of regulation but most importantly they have to deal with the issue of professional ethics. Objective: The objective of this study is to assess perceived adherence the professional ethics and associated factors among health care professionals in hospitals found in Bale Zone, Oromia region, South East - Ethiopia. Methods: A hospital based cross-sectional study was employed from April to May 2019in hospitals found in Bale Zone. All medical doctors, nurses and midwives who involved in patient treatment and care in the different units of the hospitals during data collection. The edited and cleaned data entered into a computer using SPSS version 20.0 software and a summary descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression was performed. Those variables which had significant association in bivariate logistic regression analyses were taken to multiple logistic regression models to identify variables which has independent association with the dependent variable (perceived adherence to professional ethics). All statistical tests were declared at p-value less than 0.05. Results: From the total of 417 questionnaires distributed to different health care units in the hospitals, the analysis was done for 408 responses which give a response rate of 97.8%. Overall, 186(45.6%) respondents had good perceived adherence of ethical practice. Nurse profession (AOR) = 3; 95 % CI= 1.17–7.76),Midwife profession(AOR) = 4; 95 % CI= 1.19–11.40), negative attitude towards professional ethics (AOR = 2; 95% CI: 1.03, 2.52), insufficient information about professional ethics in the curriculum (AOR = 2; 95% CI: 1.08, 2.97) and those whose work experience less than three years (AOR = 2.5; 95% CI: 1.32, 4.75) were associated with poor adherence to professional ethical practice Conclusions: This study highlight the overall ethical practice among Bale zone health professionals is low. Profession, work experience, perceived inadequacy of professional ethics curriculum and attitude had statistically significant association. Need staff’s attitude towards professional ethics, considering the intensity of CRC training for different professionals differently and revising the contents of professional ethics in the respective curriculums. Key words: adherence ,professional, Bale Zone,

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“…In the current study, there was a significant association between workplace and agreement to the SPIKES with higher agreement scores obtained by the PHC and teaching hospital physicians compared to university and public hospitals. This could be attributed to the heightened stress level due to excessive workload and low resources in the university and public hospitals that made physicians less interested or convinced with the usefulness of the protocols for BBN compared to PHC physicians who always refer the difficult or at-risk patients to the higher care level to deal with [25] .…”