How much of professional ethics are applied by medical staff? A descriptive cross-sectional surveyin south of Iran

Offering services for health, care, treatment and rehabilitation with an acceptable quality in order to provide, preserve and improve the total society health is the main goal of medical staff. In this way, principles of professional ethics make the staff more capable to concentrate on health, rights and comfort of the patients and keep their professional performance and finally their profession status at the highest level. This study is going to evaluate the rate of codes of ethics applied by the medical staff of the tertiary health care centersaffiliated with Jahrom University of Medical Sciences in south of Iran. Two hundred and eleven members of the medical staff collected by census from 8 different wards of tertiary health care centers affiliated with Jahrom University of Medical Sciences in south of Iran, participated voluntary in this descriptive cross-sectional survey. A questionnaire of 41 questions adding to demographic information (age, gender, job experience, and ward) was designed according to 5 degrees Likert scale. Validity and reliability of the questionnaire was proved by previous studies. Collected data analyzed by dependent T-test, Fisher's exact and SPSS.17 using descriptive and deductive statistics. From the 211 samples, 137 (64.9 %) were female and 74 (35.1%) were male. One hundred and thirty one (62%)were in the range of 20 to 30 years old. One hundred and twenty four (58.8%) had 5 to 10 years of job experience and 36 members (17.1%) were from gynecology ward. Rate of observance to the codes of ethics was 3.82 ± 0.75. The highest scores were: Empathy towards the patients possessed the score 4.36 ± 1.15, patients care 4.12 ± 1.09, ignorance to the illegal cares 4.10 ± 1.17 and justice in offering services 4.10 ± 1.15. Except the ward (p=0.03) and age (p=0.003), there was no other significant difference between applying ethical codes and studied factors (p> 0.05). Medical staff used a medium level of ethical behaviors in their daily job. So, improving the professional ethics by long term policies and giving proper teachings to the treating personnel in order to improve the medical services efficiency may be suggested