title: Patients' silence following healthcare staff's ethical transgressions.
abstract: The aim of this study was to examine to what extent patients remained silent to the health care system after they experienced abusive or wrongful incidents in health care. Female patients visiting a women's clinic in Sweden (n = 530) answered the transgressions of ethical principles in Health care questionnaire (TEP), which was constructed to measure patients' abusive experiences in the form of staff's transgressions of ethical principles in health care. Of all the patients, 63.6% had, at some point, experienced staff's transgressions of ethical principles, and many perceived these events as abusive and wrongful. Of these patients, 70.3% had remained silent to the health care system about at least one transgression. This silence is a loss of essential feedback for the health care system and should not automatically be interpreted as though patients are satisfied.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden. jelmer.bruggemann@liu.se
authors.forename: A Jelmer
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Brüggemann
authors.forename: Barbro
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wijma
authors.forename: Katarina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Swahnberg
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000941:ethics*; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D005260:Female; D006282:Health Personnel / Q000941:ethics*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D010361:Patients / Q000523:psychology*; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations / Q000941:ethics*; D036301:Qualitative Research; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013548:Sweden