Privacy Awareness of Nursing Students

Objective: This study was conducted in a descriptive design type to determine the privacy awareness of nursing students and associated factors. Material and Methods: The sample of this descriptive study consisted of 490 nursing students studying in Gümüşhane University Health Sciences Faculty Nursing Department and Recep Tayyip Erdogan University Health Sciences Faculty Nursing Department. The data were collected with the questionnaire developed by the researchers and the Patient Privacy Scale. To evaluate the data, continuous variables were expressed as mean, standard deviation, median (25th-75th percentile), and categorical variables as numbers (percent). A comparison of variables that did not show normal distribution between groups was evaluated by the Mann-Whitney U test, KruskalWallis, Post-Hoc Tukey test and the relationship between numerical variables was evaluated by Spearman correlation analysis. Results: The study revealed that gender, place of residence, and education on privacy were the factors affecting privacy awareness. The reasons for the violation of privacy were determined as "careless work of nurses", "heavy workload of nurses", "environmental deficiencies", and "emergencies". The privacy scale scores of the students who chose 'emergencies' as the factor causing privacy violation were found significantly high in the confidentiality of private life (p=0.021), sexual privacy (p=0.014), physical privacy (p=0.039), ensuring a favorable environment (p=0.014), and privacy scale scores (p=0.007). Conclusion: It was found that the students had high scores on privacy, and patient privacy was affected by the students’ level of knowledge about gender, privacy, and place of residence. We suggest that training for privacy practices should be repeated at regular intervals when students start the profession.