Research: Nursing Ethics
Nursing ethics is concerned with the moral dimensions of nursing practice. For many years CRB has developed nursing ethics from different angles. We have used qualitative studies to describe and explore the kinds of ethical dilemmas nurses encounter in their day-to-day work and how they solve them. Other studies have investigated the role of ethical guidelines in the building of ethical competence in nursing practice and in priority setting.
Ongoing research includes collaborations with health services researchers on ethical dilemmas in telenursing. We have three PhD projects looking at gender aspects in telenursing, guidelines for Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders in oncology care and social and ethical aspects of HPV vaccinations respectively. And a post doc project is looking at whether ethical rounds as a method can improve the ethical climate in psychiatry outpatient clinics.
What is nursing ethics?
The focus in nursing ethics research is on the relationship between the nurse and the person receiving care. A central question is what the nurse can do for the person in need of care and how a respectful meeting could take place, despite the asymmetry in the relationship between nurse and patient.
Nursing ethics focuses more on developing caring relationships than on broader ethical principles. The concept of ‘caring’ has priority over the concept of ‘curing’ and how a person should ‘be’ rather than how they should act is stressed. As a result, virtue ethics have often been elaborated within the framework of nursing ethics.
Download pdf with abstracts of publications and links to journals: Nursing Ethics Report >
More information
- Anna T. Höglund, Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer
- Marit Silén, PhD, Postdoc
- Maria Gottvall, RN, PhD student
- Roya Hakimnia, MD, PhD student
- Mona Pettersson, RN, PhD student
