Moral distress to moral success: Strategies to decrease moral distress

Moral distress, which is especially high in critical care nurses, has significant negative implications for nurses, patients, organizations, and healthcare as a whole.

A moral distress workshop and follow-up activities were implemented in an intensive care unit in order to decrease levels of moral distress and increase nurses' perceived comfort and confidence in ethical decision-making.

A quality improvement (QI) initiative was conducted using a pre- and post-intervention design. The program consisted of a four-hour interactive workshop, followed by two individual self-reflection activities at 2-3 weeks and 5-6 weeks after the workshop.

Critical care nurses working in a heart and vascular intensive care unit at a large academic medical center.

This study was deemed to be a QI project by the institution's Institutional Review Board. Participation was voluntary.

Nurses experienced a significant decrease in moral distress. The participants' average ethical confidence increased in four areas (ability to identify the conflicting values at stake, knowing role expectations, feeling prepared to resolved ethical conflict, and being able to do the right thing), with knowledge of role expectations and feeling prepared to resolve ethical conflict yielding statistically significant increases. Qualitative findings resulted in consistent themes related to causes of moral distress and ways nurses approached addressing moral distress.

This study reinforces previous evidence on moral distress and its causes in critical care nurses, and provides a mechanism for improving moral distress and ethical confidence.

This QI study demonstrates the effectiveness of an evidence-based program for decreasing critical care nurses' moral distress and increasing their ethical confidence. The strategies described in this paper can replicated by nursing leaders who wish to effect change at their local level, or adapted and expanded to other professions and clinical care units.