Caring in the Context of Risk: Moving Beyond Duty.

Area of Science:

• Nursing
• Bioethics
• Occupational Health

Background:

• Hospital-based nurses encounter significant occupational risks, including exposure to infectious diseases like COVID-19 and patient violence.
• The ethical obligations of nurses in high-risk situations, particularly concerning patient violence, remain underexplored compared to infectious disease exposures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine occupational risks faced by hospital nurses, specifically COVID-19 exposure and patient violence.
• To evaluate the adequacy of ethical decision-making frameworks for guiding nursing care provision under personal risk.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of ethical decision-making frameworks, including deontological, virtue, care, and everyday ethics.
• Comparative examination of ethical responses to COVID-19 and patient violence risks in nursing.

Main Results:

• A duty-based ethical framework, while applicable to COVID-19 risk with personal protective equipment, is insufficient for addressing the complexities of patient violence.
• Alternative ethical perspectives like virtue ethics and care ethics offer valuable insights for navigating moral complexities in high-risk nursing situations.

Conclusions:

• Existing ethical frameworks need expansion to adequately address the multifaceted risks, such as patient violence, encountered by nurses.
• Integrating ethics of the everyday, virtue ethics, and care ethics can better support nurses' ethical decision-making when facing occupational risks.