This paper attempts to uncover the ethical issues that nurses encounter in their experience of caring for terminal patients. Qualitative data were collected from 71 nurses in their class reports upon completion of a course in biomedical ethics I taught. The nurses who provided these data currently work in hospital. Four themes has been categorized from participants' description of their caring experience of terminal patients, namely: 1. Hiding the truth of patients' condition as disrupting the patient-nurse relationship 2. Subjective bias of medicine as a hindrance of complying with the patient's will 3. Ignoring the reality of death as failing to promote dying with dignity 4. Ambiguous attitude of humanism to diminish the sanctity of life. These findings reveal the overall picture of Taiwanese society with regards to the care-taking of the terminal patients. It also motivates self-examination of nurses to reflect the four ethical concepts for nursing practice, namely: advocacy, accountability, collaboration and caring. I conclude that the clinical ethics curriculum should firstly, encourage students to voice their insights gained from the clinical caring experience and secondly, the ethical curriculum should be problems oriented to reflect on multitude dilemmas of the real world.?
關聯:
Seventh International Tsukuba Bioethics Roundtable (TRT7)
