Background:
Nurses and Nursing Students are faced with morally distressing events that impact their lives throughout their professional nursing careers. As nurses, we bring valuable leadership to the health care team, we often know the right action to take in situations, however, we sometimes can experience the personal challenges of feeling constrained and powerless. Feeling fearful of what could happen if reporting through the appropriate channels to address a moral event (Epstein and Delgado (2010). In many health care settings, especially in higher acute care areas post Covid-19, nurses are at greater risk of being exposed to morally distressing issues in the workplace (Lachman, 2016). Preventing moral residue by managing moral events or issues begins with building moral courage and resiliency skills. Applying tools such as AACN 4 A’s [Ask, Affirm, Access, Act] can help with building individual, organizational and professional capacities such as self-reflection and identifying supportive leadership resources (Rushton and Kurtz, 2015). This assignment is meant to introduce you as a BSN prepared nurse to moral resiliency, courage, distress, residue and how to prevent and manage from negatively impacting your nursing career (Lachman, 2016).
Pre-Work Directions:
Read and view resources below (1-4) and incorporate into your paper. (they are also attached to this assignment)
Epstein, E.G., Delgado, S., (Sept 30, 2010) Understanding and Addressing Moral Distress OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.
http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/EthicsStandards/Resources/Courage-and-Distress/Understanding-Moral-Distress.html
Lachman, V.D., (2016). Moral resilience: managing and preventing moral distress and moral residue. MedSurg Nursing.
Rushton, C.H., Kurtz, M.J., (2015). Moral distress and you. American Nurses Association.
Video Resources:
https://www.aacn.org/nursing-excellence/healthy-work-environments
https://www.aacn.org/clinical-resources/moral-distress
https://nurse.org/education/nursing-code-of-ethics/
Paper Instructions :
In 4-5 pages (approximately 5 paragraphs (Not including title & references page), write responses using paragraphs with headings in APA Format to the following learning points:
After reading and viewing resources, describe a morally distressing event that you may have experienced or heard about as a practicing nurse and/or as a nursing student. Categorize your moral event or issue as moral uncertainty or moral dilemma. Describe the impact for you as the nurse, health care team and patient.
Using the nursing code of ethics, identify one out of the nine provisions from the nursing code of ethics that you felt was violated and describe why.
Discuss implications of power oppression that was heard, seen or felt. Describe contributors to the moral distress and what the individual and organizational factors were connected to the event.
Discuss the importance of building capacities to address moral distress. Describe AACN 4 A’s approach and provide an example on how you as the nurse would benefit in applying each of the 4 A’s to similar experiences in the future.
Describe which resources you would most utilize for preventing moral residue and building moral resiliency as a newly BSN prepared nurse.
Apply APA Formatting (title page, page numbers, double spaced, 1’’ margins, headings) include in-text citations from required resources and list at least 4 cited resources on a separate page titled “References”, minimal use of direct quotes, with paraphrasing in own words using “I” statements.
