Abstract:
Introduction: Clinical ethics is a type of medical ethics and refers to the field of activities that
investigate what medical staff as professionals should do or how they should behave concerning
a certain individual case, especially in the process of decision making. Professional ethics among
medical practitioners is a growing concern of the Ethiopian public and the media and panel
discussions mention a lot about it. The overall objective of this study was to assess self-rating practice
ofclinical ethics and associated factors among health professionals working in hospitals of Southwest and
West Shoa zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia, 2019.
Methodology:A facility based quantitative cross-sectional study design mixed with qualitative
was conducted by using convergent parallel design. The simple random sampling of six hospitals
was taken from a total of eleven hospitals and the study was done on all health professionals
working in six sampled hospitals.The study was done on 305 health professionals inhospitals of
Southwest and West Shoa Zone between April 03 and May 04, 2019.Pretested self-administered
structured questionnaire for data collection and Binary logistic regression method for data
analysis was used. Semi-structured interview questionnaire for data collection and thematic
analysis methodfor data analysis was usedfor qualitative one.
Result: The study indicated that only 36.4% of health professionals had good practice of clinical
ethics. According to multivariate analysis factors that showed association with practice of
clinical ethics were age (AOR=2.321, 95% CI= (1.045, 4.525), type of profession (AOR: 3.949,
95% CI: (1.427, 10.933), attitude(AOR: 2.368, 95% CI: (1.064, 4.604) andknowledge(AOR:
1.812, 95% CI: (1.017, 3.230)
Conclusion: There was poor practice of clinical ethics among health professionals working in
hospitals of Southwest and West Shoa zone. Factors that were associated with practicewere age
of health professionals, type of profession, knowledge and attitude towards ethical principles.
According to qualitative analysis reason out forpractice of clinical ethics were attitude of health
professionals, knowledge of health professionals, health professional‟s personal behavior,
orientation given during employment, patient load of the hospitals, being junior and fresh
graduates and understanding of surrounding community values and norms.
