The Moral Distress Model: An Empirically Informed Guide for Moral Distress Interventions

Aims and Objectives
To explore moral distress empirically and conceptually, to understand the factors that mitigate and exacerbate moral distress and construct a model that represents how moral distress relates to its constituent parts and related concepts.

Background
There is ongoing debate about how to understand and respond to moral distress in nursing practice.

Design
The overarching design was feminist empirical bioethics in which feminist interpretive phenomenology provided the tools for data collection and analysis, reported following the COREQ guidelines. Using reflexive balancing, the empirical data were combined with feminist theory to produce normative recommendations about how to respond to moral distress. The Moral Distress Model presented in this paper is a culmination of the empirical data and theory.

Methods
Using feminist interpretive phenomenology, critical care nurses in the United Kingdom (n = 21) were interviewed and data analysed. Reflexive Balancing was used to integrate the data with feminist theory to provide normative recommendations about how to understand moral distress.