Ethical challenges of nursing care in emergency situation

Introduction: Any profession that provides services has to comply with ethics as an integral part of performance.The aim of this study is to investigate the ethical challenges of nursing care in emergency situation and strategies for clinical nurse, according to the Iranian context.Method: This is a directional content analysis. To determine the most ethical challenges of nursing in emergency situation, integrated review has been used and focused on effective strategies for each of these challenges from the focused group and individual interviews. Results: The results showed four ethical challenges: I) Giving bad news to the patient and his or her family: nurses had no specific guidelines for delivering bad news to patients and families, and each nurse behaved in a specific style based on his or her own subjectivity. II) Not treatment in children with poor prognosis if survived: Most nurses have difficulty in making decisions to resuscitate premature infants, and there is no clear guidance in this regard. III) Ethical decision making on no mechanical ventilation and no CPR: Ethical and social challenges for deciding whether to continue treatment or mechanical ventilation and to perform CPR in patients with no hope for recovery and survival were debatable, which required decision making and planning, especially when clinical conditions of the patient were changed mechanical ventilation and CPR in most cases were not useful. IV) Nursing in disaster (such as floods, earthquakes, etc.) and the challenge of respecting ethical principles: Nursing in disaster situations challenges the ability of nurses to respect the code and ethical principles. Ethical issues that occur in the disaster areas relate to resource allocation, dealing with the scale and scope of a catastrophe, priorities and treatment processes, privacy, independent practice, and informed consent. For each of those, strategies for nurses have been proposed.Conclusion: Since the study of nurses experiences in emergency departments and faculty members in nursing ethics have been used, this study can provide strategies for nurses at the ethical challenges’ care and overview for organizations.

کلیدواژه ها:

ethic ، emergency ، challenge ، strategy and nursing