Patients' rights observance is one of the effective measures of patients' satisfaction of health care services. We performed this study at the aim of evaluation of nurses' awareness of patients' rights in a teaching hospital in Tehran. This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2010. In this study 156 nurses were randomly selected. Two-part questionnaire was used for data collection. The validity and reliability of questionnaire was determined and then it was distributed between subjects. The data were analyzed by SPSS version 15 using descriptive and inferential statistics. Our results showed that %58.33, %39.10 and % 2.56 of nurses have good, medium, and poor levels of awareness respectively. We observed a significant relationship between nurses awareness and work experience (P=0.008) and concurrent work in public and private hospitals (P=0.01). The most of the nurses (%95.51) were aware of "right to privacy protection and ensure confidentiality of information" and the least of them (%33.97) were aware of "right to receiving necessary information about the health care providers, the rate of tariff and insurance coverage". According to our survey it is concluded that implementation of Patients' Right Charter in this hospital is accompanied by some limitations which necessitates promotion of the nurses' awareness about patients' rights. Taken together in order to enhance nurses' awareness special measures and strategies should be considered.
Keywords: Nurses; Patients rights; Teaching hospital.