TY - JOUR
T1 - Moral Distress and Austerity
T2 - An Avoidable Ethical Challenge in Healthcare
AU - Morley, Georgina
AU - Ives, Jonathan
AU - Bradbury-Jones, Caroline
PY - 2019/9/15
Y1 - 2019/9/15
N2 - Austerity, by its very nature, imposes constraints by limiting the options for action available to us because certain courses of action are too costly or insufficiently cost effective. In the context of healthcare, the constraints imposed by austerity come in various forms; ranging from the availability of certain treatments being reduced or withdrawn completely, to reductions in staffing that mean healthcare professionals must ration the time they make available to each patient. As austerity has taken hold, across the United Kingdom and Europe, it is important to consider the wider effects of the constraints that it imposes in healthcare. Within this paper, we focus specifically on one theorised effect – moral distress. We differentiate between avoidable and unavoidable ethical challenges within healthcare and argue that austerity creates additional avoidable ethical problems that exacerbate clinicians’ moral distress. We suggest that moral resilience is a suitable response to clinician moral distress caused by unavoidable ethical challenges but additional responses are required to address those created because of austerity. We encourage clinicians to engage in critical resilience and activism to address problems created by austerity and highlight the responsibility of institutions to support healthcare professionals in such challenging times.
AB - Austerity, by its very nature, imposes constraints by limiting the options for action available to us because certain courses of action are too costly or insufficiently cost effective. In the context of healthcare, the constraints imposed by austerity come in various forms; ranging from the availability of certain treatments being reduced or withdrawn completely, to reductions in staffing that mean healthcare professionals must ration the time they make available to each patient. As austerity has taken hold, across the United Kingdom and Europe, it is important to consider the wider effects of the constraints that it imposes in healthcare. Within this paper, we focus specifically on one theorised effect – moral distress. We differentiate between avoidable and unavoidable ethical challenges within healthcare and argue that austerity creates additional avoidable ethical problems that exacerbate clinicians’ moral distress. We suggest that moral resilience is a suitable response to clinician moral distress caused by unavoidable ethical challenges but additional responses are required to address those created because of austerity. We encourage clinicians to engage in critical resilience and activism to address problems created by austerity and highlight the responsibility of institutions to support healthcare professionals in such challenging times.
KW - Critical resilience
KW - Moral resilience
KW - Resilience
KW - Feminist empirical bioethics
KW - Empirical bioethics
KW - Phenomenology
KW - Nursing
KW - Bioethics
KW - Moral distress
KW - Austerity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85069221035&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10728-019-00376-8
DO - 10.1007/s10728-019-00376-8
M3 - Article (Academic Journal)
C2 - 31317374
AN - SCOPUS:85069221035
VL - 27
SP - 185
EP - 201
JO - Health Care Analysis
JF - Health Care Analysis
SN - 1065-3058
IS - 3
ER -