Mental health nurses’ knowledge regarding patients’ rights and patients’ advocacy

Background : it is vital to increase nursing actions as patient advocates and rights among nurses. fundamental challenges in health care are patient rights, it’s to ensure excellent in medical practice, if both are aware of it, can strengthen nurse-patient interaction. advocacy is widely misunderstood and phrase that has been conceptualized. this help researchers gain better grasp of patient advocacy and rights. research aim is to see how well mental health nurses understand patient rights and advocacy. methods and subjects : research was conducted in the Beni-Suef psychiatric hospital, in patient unit using a descriptive research design on 150 male and female nurses. data collected using a self-administered scale with knowledge of nursing about mental patients’ rights and mental health nurses' vision for patient advocacy. results : nurses mean value age ranged between 23-50 years, 35.9 ± 7.6, females 136 (90.7%), 68 (45.3%) with diploma degree. 92 (61.3%) had 5 to 10 years of psychiatric nursing experience, 137 (91.3%) have previous training in quality care. nursing knowledge about mental patient’s rights 64 (42.7%) were good in knowledge, 59 (39.3%) were moderate, 27 (18%) were poor in knowledge. nursing perception for patient advocacy 105 (70%) were positive perception, 25 (16.7%) were neutral perception and 20 (13.3%) were negative perception. statistically significant relation between work data and nursing perception for patient advocacy (p < 0.05). conclusion and recommendations : mental health nurses had satisfactory knowledge about patient advocacy and about half of them had good knowledge regarding patient rights. further research is suggested to create awareness of nursing staff about importance of psychiatric patient's advocacy and patients’ rights.