The study aimed to investigate the effect of an educational program on enhancing nurses' knowledge and their compliance with ethics in maternity health services. Design: Quasi-experimental study. Setting: The study conducted at the obstetrical and gynecological departments at the Mansoura University Hospital, Egypt. Subjects: consisted of sixty-five nurses who worked at the previous mentioned setting from January 2019-April 2019. Type of sample: Purposive sampling. Tools: Self-administered structured questionnaire, an observational checklist for the code of ethics to assess nurse’s compliance with ethics in maternity health services, likert scale to assess nurse's satisfaction & nurses’ self-reported barriers. Results: The current study results showed that there was significant improvement of the total score of knowledge after implementing the program (15.06 ±1.07) in comparison to before (11.53± 2.08). In addition, the majority of nurses were complying with the nursing code of ethics during implementation of the duty of care & health instructions for women, communication skills and reporting & equipment processing. The most common barriers facing the nurses were shortage in nursing staff, work overload and emergency situations by 63.1%, 53.8% and 49.2% respectively. There was a highly statistically significant relation between the total knowledge score & nursing code as well as there was a highly significant improvement between barriers nursing duty of care & health instructions and communication skills p ≤ 0.001. Also, there was a significant difference between barriers & post intervention equipment processing p ≤ 0.05. The majority of nurses were satisfied with the educational program. Conclusion: The majority among the studied sample had a highly significant improvement post-intervention compared to pre-intervention regarding nurse's knowledge and their compliance with nursing ethics at the maternity health services, additionally there was a highly statistically significant relation between the total knowledge score & nurses compliance with nursing code of ethics. Also, the shortage in nursing staff was the main barriers that prevented the nurses to comply with nursing ethics at maternity health services. Recommendation: Design and implement a nursing ethics protocol and guideline to enhance nurse's compliance with the ethical issue at maternity health services |
