Moral Distress Homework Help

Moral Distress
Moral distress has become a common phenomenon among health workers especially nurses. Moral distress can be defined as the inability of a moral person to act or think according to his or her principal values and perceived responsibility due to internal or external factors. Moral distress has resulted in a number of physical and psychological problems. One of the situations in the past that created moral distress to me is a death of a child that I would have wanted to see alive.
Case study
I was working as an assistant nurse in a local hospital. As a student, I learnt many aspects of nursing and I took pride of my ability to handle some difficult condition such as pneumonia and assisted in emergency care. As such, I valued nursing and I found emergency department as an important destination for my nursing career. However, one incident involving the death of a child made me change my perception ion the nursing career. One day, a 3 year old child was brought to the emergency department after he was rescued drowning in a swimming pool. The child had been resuscitated for 20 minutes before being brought to the hospital. The emergency department staff and I took the child to the monitor and the isoelectric activity showed a flat line. I was really alarmed and shocked as I had never seen a dead child. I have a brother and a cousin of similar age to the dead child and so this initiated a feeling of empathy and sadness. The physical examination on the child showed no neurologic or cardiac activities. The emergency department teams tried to resuscitate the child for approximately 30 minutes but there was no respond and so the resuscitation process was stopped. Many question lingered in my mind as I asked myself how the life of the child would have been, whether there was need to undertake the process of saving the child, how the parents would react especially their perception to the medical team given that we had tried our best, and how the situation would affect the parents of the child and other related people in future. Actually, it was an emotional situation that had a big impact in my nursing career.

Moral distress as a result of the case
Emergency departments and resuscitation rooms are primary environments for moral distress experienced by nurses. Emergency departments are a place where health experts handle unexpected events that have befallen people and so there are equal possibility of life and death. In such environment, helpless between nurses and patients may occur resulting in distress. As a nurse student, who aspire to be an ardent nurse, I believed that the role of saving life and improve people quality of life. However, death of patients is very distressing because they limit my goal of offering care that is imperative in saving life. Actually, our inability of saving the child who had drowned in a swimming pool was a major source of my moral distress.
Effect of my moral distress
The first problems that I faced from the case were guilt, sadness and emotional disturbance. These emanated from the fact that we were unable to save the life of an innocent child. I had symptoms of anxiety, stress and mild depression. Further, the moral distress resulted in lowered job satisfaction as I was not comfortable to work again in the emergency department.
The steps that would have been taken to handle the situation
The situation was difficult because first aid was not given to the child in time and so the effect was irreversible. However, had the child been given first aid promptly after drowning, his life would have been saved.
Conclusion
In summary, moral distress is a condition that is affecting many nurses resulting in several psychological and physical conditions. Further, moral distress usually leads to poor job productivity due to dissatisfaction. As such, it is imperative for nurse leaders to consider moral distress as a major problem in nursing and seek an appropriate remedy.

References
Gallagher, A. (2011). Moral Distress and Moral Courage in Everyday Nursing Practice. Retrieved on March 6, 2014 from http://www.nursingcenter.com/lnc/cearticle?tid=1482298