Illustration and analysis of information on moral distress and its dimensions among nurses in educational- therapeutic health centers

Stressful ethical situations are considered as one of the problems of nursing profession, which disrupts the competence of simultaneous application of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values in patient care. Since clinical nurses are more exposed to ethical distress due to their nature of job, especially in in critical care and psychiatric wards, this study was conducted to analyze the relationship between three dimensions of moral distress. In this descriptive-correlational study 545 nurses from Tabriz educational centers were selected by census method in 2013-2014. The moral distress scale (MDS) questionnaire was distributed among partcipants and data was collected during nine months. Data were analyzed by SPSS V13, descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, and Kendall's tau-b correlation coefficient. According to the findings, the mean of moral distress was 141.89 ± 29.6 (in the intermediate range). Chi-square test showed the relationship between the dimensions of moral distress (the relation between patient's ignorance, decision-making power, and professional competence) (P