Are patients aware of their rights? A Turkish study

The: ability to differentiate between what is just and what is unjust may b e considered as the precondition to demand one's own rights. Starting from this point, this research was carried out to describe the level of awarenes s of patients concerning their rights. The main hypothesis was: the higher the socioeconomic and cultural level of patients, the higher is their aware ness of their rights. This research was conducted in one of the state hospitals in Turkey in 1998 . It is a descriptive study carried out on 128 inpatients in medical and su rgical wards. The data were collected by a questionnaire, which included qu estions on the rights of patients and gave sample cases. The sample cases w ere designed by referring to the World Health Organization Declaration on t he Promotion of Patients' Rights in Europe. Only 23% of the participants were able to recognize patient rights, while 3 2% could not; the majority (45%) were undecided in recognizing patient righ ts. The awareness scores were statistically significantly different for edu cational level categories (F=5.84; p<0.001). A continuously declining trend was observed for patient rights awareness scores from the highest educatio nal level to the lowest. This partly proves the hypothesis of the research. However, the awareness scores were not significantly different for the oth er background variables (p>0.05). Most strikingly, 38% of the patients had no idea about their diagnosis and 63% of those who had undergone surgery di d not know why they had had the operation.