Nurs Philos. 2014 Feb 15. doi: 10.1111/nup.12048. [Epub ahead of print]
- Undergraduate Studies School of Nursing, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy.
Abstract
The
nurse's moral competences in the management of situations which present
ethical implications are less investigated in literature than other
ethical problems related to clinical nursing. Phenomenology affirms that
emotional warmth is the first fundamental attitude as well as the
premise of any ethical reasoning. Nevertheless, it is not clear how and
when this could be confirmed in situations where the effect of emotions
on the nurse's decisional process is undiscovered. To explore the
processes through which situations of moral distress are determined for
the nurses involved in nursing situations, a
phenomenological-hermeneutic analysis of a nurse's report of an
experience lived by her as a moral distress situation has been
conducted. Nursing emerges as a relational doctrine that requires the
nurse to have different degrees of personal involvement, the integration
between logical-formal thinking and narrative thinking, the perception
of the salience of the given situation also through the interpretation
and management of one's own emotions, and the capacity to undergo a
process of co-construction of shared meanings that the others might
consider adequate for the resolution of her problem. Moral action
requires the nurse to think constantly about the important things that
are happening in a nursing situation. Commitment towards practical
situations is directed to training in order to promote the nurse's
reflective ability towards finding salience in nursing situations, but
it is also directed to the management of nursing assistance and human
resources for the initial impact that this reflexive ability has on
patients' and their families' lives and on their need to be heard and
assisted. The only case analysed does not allow generalizations. Further
research is needed to investigate how feelings generated by emotional
acceptance influence ethical decision making and moral distress in
nursing situations.
No comments:
Post a Comment