"My love-hate relationship": Ethical issues associated with nurses' interactions with industry

Area of Science:

• Nursing Ethics
• Healthcare Professional-Industry Relations
• Qualitative Research

Background:

• Ethical issues in nurse-industry interactions impact healthcare safety, quality, and cost.
• Empirical research on these nurse-industry relationships and their ethical dimensions is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore registered nurses' experiences and perceptions of interactions with the healthcare industry in clinical practice.

Main Methods:

• A phenomenological study design was employed.
• Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with five registered nurses in direct patient care.
• Ethical approval was obtained from the University's Committee on Human Research.

Main Results:

• Nurses frequently engage with industry, experiencing ambivalence due to reliance on industry resources for patient care amidst systemic cuts.
• Navigating these interactions involves individual trust-based strategies, often mediated by superiors, leading to conflicts of interest.
• Nurses described paradoxical reliance on industry to provide essential patient support services.

Conclusions:

• The nursing profession needs a guiding framework to interpret and manage industry interactions.
• Developing a conception of trust that integrates caring and social justice is crucial.
• Nursing must adopt a more critical stance toward industry marketing to ethically navigate these relationships.