Ethical Issues Experienced by Head Nurses at University Hospitals

The aims of the present study were to identify the ethical issues that head nurses have encountered in practice at university hospitals that provide technologically advanced medical treatment, to clarify how the nurses handled these ethical issues, and to determine the extent to which they require ethics education. Survey instrument; a questionnaire was used. It was based on the survey tool, "Ethics and Human Rights in Nursing Practice" (Fry ST & NEN. 1997). Respondents included 46 head nurses who managed inpatient wards at three university hospitals. The following results were obtained. Respondents most frequently experienced and have been most deeply troubled with "insufficient nursing staff". Therefore, respondents were troubled by ethical issues that could not be solved by themselves between the staff nurses' situation and the health care system. Many respondents recognized that nurses and physicians have to be cooperative in solving ethical issues, however the respondents also experienced frequently "conflicts in the nurse-physician relationship". From these results, it is said that nurses and physicians are required to understand mutually in order to solve ethical issues. Although head nurses have learned nursing ethics throughout their careers, they believe that they require ethics education more. These findings also suggest that, despite the inherent difficulty, it is important to solve ethical issues