Nurses' Awareness of Ethical Issues Faced in Clinical Setting: Comparison of Nursing Attending Accredited Nursing Administrator Training and Nurses Attending Clinical Practice Leaders Training

Kondo, Hiroko

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Hiroko Kondo, RN, PhD¹
Tomoko Yamada, RN, BS¹
Tomoko Shiraki, RN, MS²
(1)Depertment of Nursing, Hiroshima International University, Kure,Hiroshima, Japan
(2)Depertmenr of Nursing, Hiroshima International University, Kure,Hiroshima, Japan

Learning Objective 1: What nurses in clinical settings recognize as being ethical issues.

Learning Objective 2: The content of the responses were analyzed by training course.

Aim: To gain an understanding of what kind of circumstances, encountered in a clinical setting by attendees of two training courses with two different professional backgrounds (Accredited Nursing Administrator Training and Clinical Practice Leaders Training), were recognized as being ethical issues, and also, to reveal what are the differences in awareness arising from the differences in professional background.

Method: 57 nurses (Group A) who attended the 2010 Accredited Nursing Administrator Training and 34 nurses (Group B) who attended the Clinical Practice Leaders Training, conducted by the Nursing Association of Prefecture A, were asked to write freely about instances, that they encountered in a clinical setting in August 2010, which they recognized as representing ethical issues. These were then analyzed by extrapolating out the content of the written descriptions, grouping the issues by similarity, categorizing them, and comparing the categories for the two training course groups.

Results: The issues recognized by the course attendees in Group A as being ethical issues came under the following eight categories; “Providing information to patients and families in medical care,” “Patients’ and families’ feelings about participating in medical care,” “Providing a comfortable medical treatment environment,” “Post-hospital discharge destination,” “Relationships with doctors,” “Life-and-death decisions,” “Difficulties in terms of nurse’s own capabilities and practicing of nursing,” and “Relationships between nurses.” In contrast, the issues recognized by the course attendees in Group B as being ethical issues came under the following eight categories.

Conclusion: Many of the common ethical issues were related to doctors insufficiently performing the informed consent process and differences were also seen in awareness of ethical issues faced due to differences in job title.

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