Background: Nursing is an ethical profession and nurses are responsible for patient care. Caring for older adults requires special attention to ethical and legal issues. Nurses' unawareness in this regard would reduce patient autonomy, the quality of nursing care and finally world reduce nursing professional credentials. The aim of this study was assessing nurses' awareness of ethical and legal issues related to caring for older adults. Method: This study was cross-sectional descriptive. Participants were 200 nurses that worked in Hospitals in Kashan (2014-2015).Data was collected by the researcher-made questionnaire including three part, personal information, questions about ethical and legal issues related to caring for older adults and a question about factors related to nurses' ethical mistakes. Statistical analysis was conducted using descriptive and inferential statistics via SPSS 11.5 software. Results: The level of nurses' awareness of ethical and legal issues related to caring for older adults was undesirable. Kruskal- Wallis test showed a significant relationship between the score of nurses' awareness of ethical and legal issues related to caring for older adults and their academic degree (P=0.001). Mann- Whitney U test also showed a significant relationship between the score and previous training about aging (P=0.001) but there was no significant relationship between the score of nurses' awareness and their gender, marital status, work experience, working unit and employment status. Conclusion: The level of nurses' awareness of ethical and legal issues related to caring for older adults was not satisfactory. This condition should bring attention to the retraining programs and strengthening the supervisory system. Keywords: Awareness, Older adults, Legal issues, Ethical issues [ Downloaded from ijethics.com on 2022-01-24 ] 1 / 7 Safa A. & Hajbagheri MA. International Journal of Ethics & Society (IJES), (2019) Vol. 1, No. 3 2 Available at: www.ijethics.com (2). Iran is no exception to this, and now more than 10% of the population is seniors (3), which account for 29% of the cost of medical care (2). Elderly, due to physiological and anatomical changes, are subject to various problems, such as osteoporosis, visual impairment, and imbalance, which put this age range subjected to accidents (4,5). Therefore, caring for elderly people is an important part of the duties of nurses (6). However, studies that measure nurses' awareness of the ethical and legal issues of the elderly are rare. The results of a study in Portugal showed that nurses' attitudes towards the care of elderly patients were negative and nurses had insufficient knowledge of the elderly syndromes and proper caring for them (4). Nursing care requires special moral qualifications (7). Most studies have measured nurses' awareness of the rights of patients, not just patients. Paying attention to ethical issues in the nursing profession is very important. Nurses face the ethical challenges of nursing care every day. Nursing ethics should be considered separately from other areas of ethics (5) because of the specific characteristics of the profession and function, because the nature of nursing is such that caring ethics should be considered more closely than therapeutic considerations (8). The results of the study showed that about 15% of nurses had no knowledge of moral codes (9). In the study of Jafari et al., Nursing students followed the ethics of nursing codes, respecting patients' rights and teaching to the patient less than other ethical codes, therefore, most nurses often didn’t have the necessary readiness and ethical skills to enter the work environment (10). Contrary to the above studies, a study in Tehran reported that nurses' compliance with professional ethics standards was appropriate in terms of accountability, quality of patient care and respect for the patient (11). In the nursing field, awareness of legal issues is also important, as one of the reasons for not observing the rights of patients is the lack of nurses’ knowledge of the field of professional rights. In the study of Ahmadi et al. in Lorestan, nurses' knowledge about the legal aspects of caring was lower than other health care providers (12). A study in India showed that although 90% of