Nursing Shortage and Ethical Issues: A Narrative Review

Nursing shortage is one of challenges in nursery settings, while the situation is messing. Ethical problems is of the most important issues that can exacerbate this dilemma. The current study aimed at reviewing the ethical challenges that various communities experience due to lack of nursing staff.
The present narrative review study was conducted in 2017 in three stages: search for relevant articles, evaluation of data, and analysis of data. EMBSE, OVID, PUBMED, MEDLINE, and CINHAL databases were searched. The searched keywords were nursing shortage, workforce shortage, healthcare staff shortage, moral, ethic, ethics, ethical problems, and combination of the keywords. The Persian databases such Magiran, SID, and IranMedex were also searched for the same terms and articles about nursing shortage and ethical problems. Articles were evaluated and selected based on the inclusion criteria.
Out of 562 titles, 6 papers were selected and enrolled in the study. Various challenges were discussed in the selected studies of which nurses migration from the developing countries to the developed ones, ethical challenges due to decreased quality of nursing services, ethical challenges related to drug administration errors and work pressure because of nursing shortage were the most important ones.
Lack of nursing staff is one of the most important challenges in the last century that nurses in most communities faced with. Iran also deals with such dilemma. Lack of nursing staff is associated with many problems such as ethical issues, may be the most important ones, since it caused a lot of problems to nurses such as burnout, job dissatisfaction, job leaving, stress, and emotional exhaustion. Therefore, it is necessary to collect and categorize the problems associated with lack of nursing staff in order to make an urgent decision to overcome this dilemma.