The Price of Advocacy: Dealing with Moral Distress
Ann B. Hamric, PhD, RN, FAAN
Overview:
Healthcare professionals often face complex ethical dilemmas in the workplace. Some professionals confront the ethical issues directly while others turn away. Moral courage helps individuals to address ethical issues and take action when doing the right thing is not easy. Nurses benefit from a better understanding of these dilemmas. This multimedia presentation introduces nurses to the Crescendo Effect linking moral distress and moral residue and its influence on nurse advocacy.
Purpose/Goal: To introduce nurses to the Crescendo Effect linking moral distress and moral residue and its influence on nurse advocacy.
Objectives:
1. Distinguish moral distress and moral residue from other emotionally distressing phenomena that occur in clinical nursing practice.
2. Identify two approaches to strengthen advocacy in dealing with the Crescendo Effect.
Author:
Dr. Hamric has served on four interdisciplinary ethics committees beginning in 1975, and currently is a member of UVA's Ethics Committee. In addition to her work with the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities, she serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of Virginia. She has written and conducted research on the phenomenon of moral distress since 2000, including the first quantitative study of moral distress in physicians (Hamric & Blackhall, 2007). She jointly published an article (Epstein & Hamric, 2009) detailing a model relating moral distress and moral residue over time, which the authors named "The Crescendo Effect". This phenomenon is the subject of this presentation. In 2008, she was awarded the "Substantive Contribution to Nursing Ethics" from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Affinity Group for Nursing in recognition of her work. Recent studies have focused on nurses' access to ethics consultations, ethical factors related to nurse-physician collaboration in end-of-life care in intensive care units, and financial conflicts of interest and research integrity in medical and nursing school faculty.
The planners and author(s) of this continuing nursing education activity have disclosed no relevant financial relationships with any commercial companies pertaining to this activity.
Contact Hours: 1.3
Expiration Date: 12/31/2014
Member Price: $0.00
Non-Member Price: $55.00