Due to the rising cost of healthcare, increased patient awareness and medico-legal issues, there has been issues revolving around the care that is being provided by doctors. In most medical establishments, it is deeply believed that patients’ bill of rights are still not honored although there are clear laws and regulations about what the patient’s rights are, the obligation of medical personnel as well as the way of respecting these rights. In order to preserve the safety and quality of the health care system, the medical team including doctors, nurse’s even medical students play a crucial role in helping patients to protect their rights. Medical students-based evaluation is needed because they are the grass roots of the health care system who will be dealing with the patients in the future. This study was designed to assess student’s awareness of the existence of the Patient’s Charter, sensitize the students about the importance of the rights of a patient in clinical practice and assess the extent of their knowledge on it. A cross sectional study was conducted from June 2019 to July 2019 in our college. A study population of 750 medical students from Melaka Manipal Medical College Malaysia was selected. Purposive sampling was used to enroll students for this study and they were asked to respond the validated questionnaire on a three-point Likert scale. The analysis included frequency table, percentages, odds ratio, Chi-square test and logistic regression. All statistical tests were seen at two-tailed level of significance (p≤0.05). A total of 197 (77.25%) out of 255 medical students participated; 53.81% of students aware of the existence of patient charter of rights while 46.19% were not aware of it. Most of them heard about it from either mass media, physician, college, relatives or nurses. There were also some who read it from internet, placard on hospital wall, news articles, books and others. 48.22% showed that they had adequate knowledge on Patient’s Rights and the remaining 51.78% showed inadequate knowledge. It is seen that the students who were aware of Patient’s Rights were 1.9178 times more likely to have more knowledge on the rights than those who were not aware of Patient’s rights. Patients’ rights is still an issue that needs to be addressed among medical staff. Thus, it is obligatory to sensitize the newly-inducted medical students by instilling some information on these desirable topics during their foundation orientation course in the form of lectures/role-play; later on reinforcement of these messages can be done during community postings. This ensures patients to receive care based on humanistic and ethical rights.

Patient Charter of Rights, Awareness, Knowledge, Medical Students