Meeting Nurses’ Needs: Strategies for Engaging Nurses in Ethics Consultation

AbstractClinical ethics is a growing and evolving field. While initially physician-centric, clinical ethics has begun to recognize the need to support nurses in navigating the unique ethical challenges they encounter in nursing practice. Yet we claim that many ethics consultation services still fail to incorporate nurses' experiences into their consultation practices. While some clinical ethics services and centers report frequently receiving ethics consultation requests from nurses, others have identified this as a distinct problem. In this article, we will describe several reasons why nurses might not engage with ethics consultation services, including inaccurate expectations about the consultation process, fear of retaliation, and barriers to access. Using a case study of a patient with fluctuating decision-making capacity, we will highlight ways in which non-nurse clinical ethicists or ethics consultants can fail to account for the unique experiences of nurses in their consultation steps, thereby providing recommendations that are of little utility to the clinical nurse. We will provide several strategies for ethics consultants to address these barriers and ensure attentiveness to nurses by integrating nurses into consultation, empowering nurses, and incorporating nursing ethics concepts into their work.