Attitudes of patients and their families towards medical privacy and competence of bearer or receiver of bad news

Background: Based on the patients' and relatives' views on the level of preservation of privacy rights of individuals, we propose a way to reduce problems and disagreements about the competence of the provider and recipient of bad news. Methods: In the current cross-sectional study, the participants were recruited from the main northwest hospital of Iran. It was also conducted to study the scope of medical privacy and competence of bearers or receivers of bad news. After the literature review, two questionnaires were designed and administered. They contained items pertinent to the scope of medical privacy and competence of bearers and receivers of bad news. Each item of the original questionnaire was scored on a 5-point Likert scale. Results: The model quality and significance level were obtained using KMO and Bartlett tests. The results (patient's attitudes questionnaire: KMO=0729 and P0.05 in the Bartlett test; family attitudes questionnaire: KMO=0.764 and P0.05 in the Bartlett test) confirmed the model efficiency. According to the results from factor variance and their cumulative rate, the predictive power of the model was obtained as 62.019%, based on the overall factor variance rate. The majority of patients wanted to be informed about their disease conditions. They also considered bad news to be medical privacy and disagreed that their medical information should be opened up with others without permission. Conclusion: To preserve medical privacy, it is recommended that a system be designed that allows patients at the admission to the medical center to enlist their eligible family members to whom medical information can be delivered.