Assignment: Moral Distress
Assignment: Moral Distress
Assignment: Moral Distress
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Week 8 discussion Discussion Prompt #1 Describe a clinical situation in which a registered nurse may encounter moral distress. Answer the AACN’s Four A’s found on page 84 in your Butts and Rich text to further explain the situation, and the possible mitigation strategies. Discussion Prompt #2 Describe different ways that social media use can violate ethical nursing practices. How can ethical social media use be beneficial to health care professionals and their patients?
Answer the AACN’s Four A’s found on page 84 in your Butts and Rich text to further explain the situation, and the possible mitigation strategiesAnswer the AACN’s Four A’s found on page 84 in your Butts and Rich text to further explain the situation, and the possible mitigation strategies“Human reasoning does not depend on our ability to cast answers at one another, but our
ability to find the sources of our disagreement” (Jameton, 1984, p.6). In providing healthcare
services, professionals often are faced with stressful situations and ethical dilemmas that can lead
to disagreements. Nurses come in contact with ethical dilemmas throughout their daily work due
to the paternalistic nature of the healthcare field, for example, a hospital’s policy to collect a
complete blood count specimen from all admitted patients regardless of need. This imposes a
costly and unnecessary risk for the patient. Nurses do not have the necessary resources to change
the practice due to their lack of authority (Jameton, 1984, p.6). “Doctors and nurses feel trapped
by the competing demands of administrators, insurance companies, lawyers, and patients’
families, and they are forced to compromise on what they believe is right for the patients”
(Theobald, 2013, p.5).
These ethical situations experienced by healthcare workers were collectively termed
moral distress in 1984 by the philosophy professor, Andrew Jameton. When moral distress was
first coined by Jameton, it was defined as, “arising when one knows the right thing to do, but
institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action” (p.6).
Jameton taught many nursing students and saw the students’ morals were often being contested
when working in clinical settings. In his findings, he discovered many of his nursing students
were being morally challenged and thus were placed under significant moral distress. These
students were suffering before they even finished school and had to quickly learn to adapt to
their new profession (McCarthy & Gastmans, 2015, p. 132).