Moral Distress Consultation Services: Insights from Consultants

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Medical Ethics
• Organizational Psychology

Background:

• Moral distress arises from systemic issues in healthcare, affecting patient care quality and safety.
• Common causes include inadequate staffing, resource limitations, and poor teamwork.
• Moral distress consultation is an emerging intervention to support healthcare providers.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore the experiences and perspectives of moral distress consultants.
• To identify key themes for developing and improving moral distress consultation services.
• To lay the groundwork for an evaluation tool for these services.

Main Methods:

• Qualitative descriptive study design.
• 10 semi-structured interviews with moral distress consultants.
• Data collected from two institutions with established consultation services.

Main Results:

• Identified key themes: consultant training, service purpose, leadership engagement, success metrics, and service visibility/sustainability.
• Findings suggest a framework for establishing or enhancing moral distress consultation programs.
• Initial steps toward developing an evaluation tool for service utility and quality.

Conclusions:

• Moral distress consultants offer valuable insights into optimizing consultation services.
• The study provides a foundation for creating robust moral distress consultation frameworks.
• Further development of evaluation tools is recommended to assess service impact.