Ethical Distress and its Related Components in Emergency Department Employees: a Systematic Review

Moral distress is one of the hidden moral challenges in providing nursing care services that occurs in conditions of impossibility to perform the right job despite knowing its correctness. This challenge is greater among nurses in wards with more acute conditions, such as the emergency department. This study was conducted with the aim of systematically reviewing moral distress and its related components in studies conducted on emergency department employees.

This research is based on a systematic review that evaluates the quality of articles using the STROBE standard checklist. Preliminary studies were conducted through articles in Persian language databases; SID, Iranmedex, Magiran and English language databases; Science Direct, PubMed, ProQuest, Cochrane Library, Embase, Scopus and Google Scholar; was examined. In order to access the full text of articles containing Persian keywords; Moral distress, moral stress, moral stress, moral distress, moral anxiety, moral turmoil, and emergency-related phrases were used as a combination of words; Also includes boolean search methods and OR operators and Mesh keywords; Moral Distress, Ethical Distress, Ethical unease, Ethical disquiet, Emergency were used.

In the initial stage, 466 studies were studied. The researchers then reviewed the articles that had been searched, and finally, after removing duplicate, irrelevant items, qualitative studies, narrative review, and a letter to the editor; 18 researches were used to write this research. Among the studies studied, 11 Iranian articles were conducted, which shows 61.11% of the total studies; other studies have been conducted in Taiwan, China, the United States, Indonesia and Switzerland. The average moral distress of emergency department nurses was moderate and there was a significant relationship with components such as background and workload of the findings of these studies.

The set of studies performed on emergency department nurses is a reliable number to show the level of moral distress, but this amount of study is not reliable to obtain a model of components and variables related to moral distress. For this purpose, in addition to further research on this group of nurses, by removing the characteristics of emergency department nurses, a systematic review of all studies conducted in the field of moral distress on the nursing community can be done to achieve more accurate results.