Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

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Observation of patients’ rights as a major component in defining the standards of clinical services can increase patient satisfaction and is an important indicator of health care quality. Since most hospital patients are admitted through the emergency department, this study was conducted to investigate the observance of patients’ rights in the emergency department of Nemazee Hospital during 2015.

This cross-sectional study was performed on 100 patients over a period of one month. Data were collected by a questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS version 21 and statistical tests including descriptive statistics and inferential analysis.

The mean of the patients’ age in this study was 54.4 ± 19.35. Based on our findings, the overall level of observing patients’ rights was 51%, while patients’ expectations were 93%. Moreover, there was a meaningful difference between observance of the patients’ rights and their expectations in all aspects based on the paired sample t-test (P<0.05). It was also established that age was one of the factors affecting observance of patients’rights (P<0.05).

In this study, observation of patients’ rights in the emergency department was at the intermediate level, while patients’ expectations were higher in comparison.

In order to promote patient satisfaction, it seems necessary to educate the personnel and medical students on patients’ rights by holding workshops, reducing the waiting time for receiving services, and establishing an order in the system based on the patient’s condition.

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Organizational culture affects the values, traditions, and norms of an organization. Therefore, the organizational behavior means how much an organization acts ethically. The cultural environment affects the formation of the organizational climate and, behavior. There are some deficiencies in the standards of organizational culture. This study aimed to review different aspects to accredit hospitals culturally in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences and consisted of two stages: First; the initial qualitative study was done by interviewing the experts who were selected purposely and held focused group discussion sessions to recognize the different aspects of cultural validation and develop an cultural accreditation manual for hospitals. Second stage was an evaluation of the hospitals in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences according to the cultural accreditation manual. Among 17 targeted hospitals, passed the training course of identifying indicators and volunteered to participate in the survey, 11 hospitals which had performed self-evaluation according to their manuals entered the survey. Seven main subjects and 17 sub-titles were derived from the first qualitative study. The subjects included considering religious laws demanded by patients and those patients’ accompaniers, patient satisfaction, staff satisfaction, consideration of ethical rules, dress codes, cultural activities of the hospital, and environmental neatness of the hospital. The evaluation of the above factors ranged from 0-1. The hospitals^, total scores were from 0.68 to 0.78. Findings suggest capability of the indicators for hospital cultural evaluation. The qualitative study ranked the hospitals in every aspect.