Nursing ethics
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One of the difficulties nurses experience in clinical practice in relation to ethical issues in connection with young oncology patients is moral distress. In this descriptive correlational study, the Moral Distress Scale-Paediatric Version (MDS-PV) was translated from the original language and tested on a conventional sample of nurses working in paediatric oncology and haematology wards, in six north paediatric hospitals of Italy. 13.7% of the total respondents claimed that they had changed unit or hospital due to moral distress. ⋯ The results confirmed the validity of the MDS-PV (Cronbach's alpha = 0.959). This study represents the first small-scale attempt to validate MDS-PV for use in paediatric oncology-haematology nurses in Italy.
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Patient's duties are a topical but little researched area in nursing ethics. However, patient's duties are closely connected to nursing practice in terms of autonomy, the best purpose of care and rethinking from the patient's perspective. This article is a metasynthesis (N = 11 original articles) of patient's duties, aimed to create a tentative model. ⋯ In conclusion, so-called right-based duties of a patient constitute the basic argument. Patient's duties are not unambiguous for all patients, and the global perspective to duties has been challenged. However, due to both conceptual and practical reasons, rethinking of patient's duties is needed.
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Nurses and physicians may experience ethical conflict when there is a difference between their own values, their professional values or the values of their organization. The distribution of limited health care resources can be a major source of ethical conflict. ⋯ This study examined the research question 'What are the organizational ethical conflicts that hospital nurses and physicians experience in their practice?' We interviewed 34 registered nurses, 10 nurse managers, and 31 physicians as part of a larger study, and asked them to describe their ethical conflicts with organizations. Through content analysis, we identified themes of nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations and compared the themes for nurses with those for physicians.
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The Jewish religious tradition summons its adherents to save life. For religious Jews preservation of life is the ultimate religious commandment. At the same time Jewish law recognizes that the agony of a moribund person may not be stretched. ⋯ We discuss the position of two prominent Orthodox Jewish authorities - the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi J David Bleich - towards the role of life-sustaining treatment in end-of-life care. From the review, the characteristic halachic and heterogeneous character of Jewish ethical reasoning appears. The specificity of Jewish dealing with ethical dilemmas in health care indicates the importance for contemporary healthcare professionals of providing care which is sensitive to a patient's culture and worldview.