Moral Distress of a Patient When in Critical Care Unit Essay

Moral Distress of a Patient When in Critical Care Unit Essay

Moral distress has been something that every healthcare professional has encountered in their career. “Researchers have shown that moral distress is a wide spread problem for health care providers including nurses, pharmacists, social workers, physicians, and health care managers in a wide range of acute and community health care settings” (Pauly et al., 2012). A clinical situation that a nurse may encounter that may cause moral distress is when a patient in critical care unit has a poor prognosis and on the ventilator. Family would still want to have everything done on the patient and keep the patient on the ventilator even if the physicians state that the patient might not be able to be weaned off the ventilator. The Four A’s is used as a guide to identify and analyze moral distress. The four A’s are: ask, affirm, assess, and act. The first A is ask. Ask the appropriate question to be aware that moral distress is present. The questions that should be asked in this situation are: “what would the patient want,” “what are the reasons for the family to have the patient kept on life support,” “what is the prognosis of the patient.” The next A is affirming the distress. Affirming the distress is letting your fellow colleagues know and aware why you feel that way. Moral Distress of a Patient When in Critical Care Unit Essay Next A is to assess sources of moral distress to prepare for an action plan. The sources would be the patient’s prognosis and the family’s decision about the patient. Last part of the Four A’s is to act to implement strategies to preserve integrity and authenticity (Butts, 2016). By talking to family and the healthcare team, that would be acting to preserve integrity and authenticity to have the moral distress addressed.Moral Distress of a Patient When in Critical Care Unit Essay