ETHICAL ISSUES AFFECTING NURSES’ EFFECTIVE PROVISION OF CARE IN KENYAN GOVERNMENT HOSPITALS: A CASE STUDY OF KENYATTA NATIONAL HOSPITAL
Keywords:
possible risk to health, nurse- physician conflicts, informed consent, information confidentialityAbstract
Purpose: The purpose of the study was to establish the ethical issues affecting nurses’ effective provision of care in government hospitals with Kenyatta National Hospital as the case study.
Methodology: The research design was a descriptive survey. The target population comprised of all nurses in KNH. Stratified random sampling was used to group respondents per department and simple random sampling was used to select respondents per stratum. A sample of 366 respondents was used. Questionnaires were then be used to obtain primary data. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 12) was used to analyse quantitative data and presented using descriptive statistics.
Results:The findings indicated that risk to health had a positive and significant effect on provision of care as indicated by (r=0.455, p=0.000).Nurse_ Physicians conflict had a positive and significant effects provision of care as supported by (r=0.310, p=0.005). Informed consent had a positive and significant association to provision of healthcare as supported (r=0.513, p=0.02). Finally, Consent to treat Information with confidentiality also had a positive and significant association with provision of health care (r=0.051, p=0.000).
Policy recommendation: The results will be used by the management of KNH to understand the ethical issues faced by nurses, so as to make policies and procedures that will broaden areas that nurses can make decisions concerning effective patients’ care. Management in public hospitals and colleges can also incorporate ethical trainings into the curriculum and short training courses. They can also form ethical committees to help nurses deal with ethical issues encountered. Future researchers will find the research findings helpful as they will use them as reference points or benchmarks in their endeavour to do more research.
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