Interprofessional ethics education through a simulation focused on collective moral distress

Healthcare clinicians must be familiar with the process of organ donation and be prepared to communicate effectively and compassionately with the families of organ donors. They also must develop resiliency practices to face the complex ethical issues that often arise in cases involving brain death and organ donation. In this paper, we describe an ethics-oriented interprofessional education (IPE) initiative that aims to improve knowledge of the organ donation process, awareness of ethical issues that commonly arise in that process, and IPE-based strategies to decrease moral distress. Using three instruments, we evaluated the ethics-oriented IPE with 127 medical students and student nurses. The largest gains were seen in student understanding and appreciation for professional roles and responsibilities, as well as interprofessional teamwork. Additionally, student moral distress decreased after the facilitated debrief. The ethics-oriented IPE is innovative in its focus on interprofessional teamwork and clinical ethics, as well as in its inclusion of moral distress awareness and moral resiliency training.