Attitude and Knowledge of Medico-Legal Issues among Nurses Working on Surgical Wards in University College Hospital, Ibadan

Abstract

Medico-legal issues are the issues that involve both medical and legal matters. It involves situations where legal principles and medical practices overlap, leading to legal implications for healthcare providers, institutions and patients. Medico-legal issues among surgical nurses refer to legal and ethical challenges that arise in context of surgical care. The study was set out to assess the attitude and knowledge of medico-legal issues among Nurses working on surgical wards in the University College Hospital, Ibadan. Therefore. a simple random sampling method was used to select 121 respondents from the population of surgical Nurses in University College Hospital, Ibadan in Oyo State. The descriptive statistics of frequency count, percentages, inferential statistics of chi square and analysis of variance were used for the analysis. Overall findings showed that majority (78.9%) of the respondents had good knowledge about medico-legal issues, also majority (75.1%) of the respondents had positive attitude towards dealing with medico-legal cases. The hypothesis testing showed that there was significant relationship between the knowledge and attitude of Nurses working on surgical wards towards medico-legal issues with χ² = 86.086^a df=28, P=0.000, there was significant relationship between the years of experience of Nurses working on surgical wards and their attitude towards medico-legal issues with χ² = 25.419^a df=14, P=0.031, there was no significant relationship between years of experience and occurrence of medico-legal issues with χ² = 2.119^a df=2, P=0.347,  also there was no significant relationship between professional rank of surgical nurses and occurrence of medico-legal issues with χ² = 3.716^a df=2, P=0.156. The outcome of this study indicated that surgical nurses possess knowledge and positive attitudes towards medico-legal issues. It was recommended that nurses work at surgical ward should be exposed to medico legal issues that has to do with their duties.