An Analysis of Nurses Ethical Behavior toward Persons Accompanying a Patient Based on the Theory of Virtue Ethics Print

Since the concepts of ethics and morality are deeply rooted in professional nursing, upholding such concepts in this sensitive profession would not simply be achieved by developing new codes of ethics. Thus, descriptive researches in different fields capable of exploring latent ethical aspects of the relevant field are deemed essential. Therefore, the main objective of the current research is to explore and identify the ethical components of nurse's behavior towards the persons accompanying the patients at public hospitals of Mashhad, Iran. The current paper is a descriptive research drawing upon the strategy of content analysis. Semi-structured deep interviews were used to collect data, and in order to analyze the collected data, descriptive content analysis was employed. the research population included all the exemplar nurses at public hospitals in Mashhad. The study samples consisted of 14 nurses. The 4 main themes of respect for persons accompanying a patient, informational support, magnanimity, and empathy, and 13 sub-categories emerged from data analysis. As revealed by the findings, virtuous nurses not only felt responsible for the patients, but also for persons accompanying them and their relatives. These nurses had done all in their power to understand the gravity of their situation and console them, and offer them counsel in order to pull through this stressful phase. Moreover, magnanimity towards the persons accompanying the patient was a component, abstracted in this research, which illustrated the virtuous spirit of the nurses.