As has been widely reported, a recent study indicates that almost half of New Zealand nurses have considered leaving their jobs out of ‘moral distress.’ The high rate of moral distress among nurses is not surprising, given the morally-significant nature of their work. In fact, that’s a feature of clinical work of all kinds. I made this general point in reference to a specific clinical context almost a decade ago, in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, in an article called Treatment Resistance in Anorexia Nervosa and the Pervasiveness of Ethics in Clinical Decision making. Here’s a quote that sums up the main point:
But it is useful to remind ourselves that an ethical issue is not something that arises every few weeks in clinical settings, in those regrettable moments of crisis in which clinicians feel the need to seek advice from ethics consultants or committees. Ethical issues of an acute nature may (we hope) be rare, but ethics—the making of value judgements, of weighing our actions against shared standards—is a task inherent to clinical life.
As the New Zealand study illustrates, it’s a point that applies to nursing practice quite generally.
The Nursing Ethics Blog 