TRUTHTELLING BEHAVIOR OF NURSES: WHAT NURSES DO WHEN PHYSICIANS DECEIVE CLIENTS.
Contributors: Boston University.
Published: 1988
Number of pages: 238
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Women's Studies.; Health Sciences, Health Care Management.
Description: The purpose of this study was to examine and provide an explanation for the behavior of nurses when faced with clinical situations which required them to choose one or more behaviors on a continuum of total honesty (fully informing clients) to fully deceiving clients (upholding the physician's plant).

A randomly selected sample of 41 staff nurses from three hospitals known for their varying support of a professional model of practice read and responded to a set of dilemmas concerning the issues of informed consent, physician incompetency, withholding of information from clients regarding prognosis and diagnosis and use of placebos. In addition, subjects were asked to relate and discuss a truthtelling dilemma from their own practice.

The interview schedule was made available to this researcher by Dr. Carol Gilligan of Harvard's Gender, Education and Human Development Study Center.

The interview material was coded according to a coding scheme developed by the researcher. Transcriptions of the interviews were utilized to identify those factors which appeared with frequency in the reasoning of subjects which led to moral choice. There are eight factors or variables which were found to appear repeatedly across all dilemmas: preventing harm, doing good, patient's right to know, clinical justification of physician's plan, head nurse's expectations, scope of nursing practice, legal responsibilities, and subjects' perceptions of the right thing to do. All but the last were significantly related to truthtelling behavior.

Explanation of the truthtelling behaviors selected by the subjects was based on the theoretical models developed by Stanley Milgram, Carol Gilligan and Catherine Murphy.

The most important finding of this study was that contextual factors play an important role in the moral decision-making process. All subjects defined themselves as patient advocates and desired to advocate for the patient in all situations. Though subjects were almost unanimous in their agreement that it would be best for the patients to be informed in all situations, they were unclear if it would be the best thing for them to be informing the client.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-11, Section: B, page: 4756.

Thesis (D.N.SC.)--BOSTON UNIVERSITY, 1988.

School code: 0017.