Empowering Nurses to Handle Ethical Dilemmas (Podcast)

Clinical nurses encounter ethical scenarios in their daily practice, ranging from end-of-life situations to disagreements between patients and their families.

“Because nurses are with the patients all day – they’re in the bed space – the way in which a nurse encounters these kinds of ethical issues is so intense because of the proximity that nurses have to patients,” says Georgina Morley, PhD, RN, HEC-C, director of the Nursing Ethics Program at Cleveland Clinic.

One of the aims of the Nursing Ethics Program, which was launched in 2020 as a collaboration between the Nursing Institute and the Center for Bioethics, is to create avenues for caregivers to receive moral distress support. In this episode of Cleveland Clinic’s Nurse Essentials podcast, Morley shares details about the program and, more broadly, nursing ethics. She delves into:

• Moral distress nurses experience caring for patients
• Ways to help caregivers, including ethics rounds, moral spaces programs and moral distress reflective debriefs
• Nursing ethics fellowships and research
• Advice for nurses who want to learn more about nursing ethics and resources

Click the podcast player above to listen to the episode now, or read on for a short, edited excerpt. Check out more Nurse Essentials episodes at my.clevelandclinic.org/podcasts/nurse-essentials or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast excerpt

Morley: We have a moral spaces program. So, that is an ethics education program for clinical nurses and assistant nurse managers. We started that a couple of years ago. We're on our second cohort now, so next year will be our third cohort. It is a small group. We have applications each year. The first year we had 20 nurses, and then this past year we had 25 nurses. We'll probably have 25 [in 2025], I think, hopefully.

It's a seven-month program, and we meet once a month. We provide foundational ethics education with the idea being that we're empowering nurses to address the ethical issues that they encounter. Because I think nurses are generally pretty good at seeing them, but then it's, "What do I do now? How do I actually move this forward? How do I actually advance this in the right kind of direction? How do I ask some of those questions?" I think that can always be pretty challenging, too.

So, we really want to empower nurses. There's some decent evidence growing now that ethics education is actually one of the most promising ways to address moral distress. So yeah, we're really trying to harness that piece.