The patient's refusal of treatment in prehospital emergency medicine: Theoretical assessment and a field study

Emergency care is a unique area of medicine. It is a special area of both the physical space and human resources. It has own dynamics.Pre-hospital emergency medicine is a different version of the emergency medicine. The basic approach of pre-hospital emergency medicine is to care directly to the patient at scene. Being a non-hospital environment brings health care professionals face many problems. Ethical issues, is one of the most important issues of this field. In ethical issues, refusal of treatment and related process are major problem area.Purpose of this study was to determine the approaches of emergency health care professionals on the refusal of treatment.For this purpose, it was made a descriptive research to pre-hospital emergency health care professionals who engaged active duty in the field in Kahramanmaraş, Adana, Mersin and Antakya. There are 10 expressions in the form of data collection. It was asked to participants to score between points 0-10 according to the degree of adoption of these expressions. 424 participants were evaluated.Accordingly, health care professionals are adopt the patient?s right to refuse of treatment. However, it contains the important ethical conflicts as the existence of an emergency medical condition and detection of competence, during the use of this right. Age of the young professionals and female participants exhibited an attitude which highlights the utility. In general, it was found that incompetent patients have not the right to refuse the treatment.Young participants have demonstrated an attitude of respect for patient?s autonomy. However, they expressed an opinion that prone to paternalism in emergency medical situations.Generally, it was found that pre-hospital emergency care professionals adopted the right the refuse of treatment; however they did not adopt the use of the right in presence of life-threatening situations and non-competence of the patient.