Background: Ethical conflicts in nursing have generally been studied in terms of temporal frequency and the degree of conflict. This study presents a new perspective for examining ethical conflict in terms of the degree of exposure to conflict and its typology.
Objectives: The aim was to examine the level of exposure to ethical conflict for professional nurses in critical care units and to analyze the relation between this level and the types of ethical conflict and moral states.
Research design: This was a descriptive correlational study. Central and dispersion, normality tests, and analysis of variance were carried out.
Participants and research context: A total of 203 nurses were from two third-level teaching hospitals in Spain. Both centers are part of the University of Barcelona Health Network. Participants filled out the Ethical Conflict in Nursing Questionnaire-Critical Care Version.
Ethical considerations: This investigation received the approval of the ethical committees for clinical investigation of the two participating hospitals. Participants were informed of the authorship and aims of the study.
Findings: The index of exposure to ethical conflict was [Formula: see text]. The situations involving analgesic treatment and end-of-life care were shown to be frequent sources of conflict. The types of ethical conflict and moral states generally arranged themselves from lesser to greater levels of index of exposure to ethical conflict.
Discussion: The moderate level of exposure to ethical conflict was consistent with other international studies. However, the situations related with family are infrequent, and this presents differences with previous research. The results suggest that there is a logical relationship between types of conflict and levels of exposure to ethical conflict.
Conclusion: The types of ethical conflict and moral states were related with the levels of exposure to ethical conflict. The new perspective was shown to be useful for analyzing the phenomenon of ethical conflict in the nurse.
Keywords: Critical care nursing; ethical conflict model; moral distress; types of ethical conflict.
© The Author(s) 2014.