Nursing care or healthcare profession is one that is full of stress. This stress comes from various challenges and complexities they face in everyday life while serving the patients.
This pandemic has added even more to the daily burdens of the nurses. This is making them face situations that make them morally distressed.
Moral distress is rather a challenging problem that is causing various significantly negative effects on healthcare professionals. This hinders their abilities like advocating for the patient and performing their duties adequately.
Moreover, during any disaster or crisis, the moral distress frequency and severity increase even more.
When they fail to manage the distress properly their overall well-being gets affected. This moral distress is one of the main aspects causing turnover in this profession. There are various strategies that nurses can apply to deal with moral distress positively.
Addressing and acknowledging moral disaster is necessary to preserve their dignity.
What is Moral Distress?
Right now you might be thinking
“What is moral distress that has these many negative effects on the life of healthcare professionals?”
Moral distress typically occurs when a professional know the ethically correct actions that must be taken in a situation. However, they are unable to put corrective actions in the situation due to certain constraints.
When they know what’s right but they cannot do it because they are constrained. These constraints can occur from both internal and external factors. These constraints can be anything like dilemmas, uncertainty, or conflicts.
This moral distress profoundly threatens the core values of these professionals. This is distinct from other types of distresses nurses face like burnouts, fatigue, etc.
These types of distresses are usually caused by workplace stress. However moral distress is caused due to factors constraining them to take the right actions.
Moral Resilience:
Moral resilience is something that is necessary for nurses. Whether they have wound care nurses or old age care nurses, moral resilience help deal with moral distress.
Moral Distress can be defined as the nurse’s capacity to sustain or restore their integrity. This sustaining or restoring is done in response to moral complexity, distress, setbacks, or confusion.
Strategies for developing Moral Resilience:
Developing moral resilience is necessary for nurses to cope with the issue of moral distress effectively. The strategies for developing moral resilience include:
Self-Awareness:
Developing self-awareness will help develop moral resilience. For instance, you can examine the positive and negative assumptions that guide your behavior. This behavioral examination will help you to know if they are accurate and appropriate or not.
Self-Regulation:
You should also learn to self-regulate. Self-regulation is a great strategy. Learning self-regulation will help you to disrupt your negative patterns of behaving and thinking. Methods that can help you with self-regulation include
Mindfulness-based stress reductionMovement practices (such as tai chi or yoga)Meditation etc.Learning your Ethical values:
You need to learn how you can wisely discern ethical challenges, complexities, and principled actions. You can do this by thoroughly understanding your values. And then analyze your ethical dilemmas based on your ethical values.
Developing Courageous Mindset:
The more courageous you are, the easier it will be for you to take courageous actions without nervousness. Your courageous mindset will help you speak your mind and state your facts.
Preserve Integrity:
You should keep in your mind that you must preserve your team’s dignity along with yours. You can surely seek support from others too for this purpose.
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