A Nurse's Moral Distress

Theresa Brown writes about moral distress in the New York Times' Well blog this week in a post entitled "Prolonging Death at the End of Life." The nurses found it emotionally challenging to care for a dying young man.

Many of us found it hard to come to work. The young man wasn’t my patient, but we all knew him and his parents by sight, and knew their story. As time passed I began to feel deeply ashamed of what we were doing to him. The professional label for the feelings we nurses had is “moral distress,” the anxiety, fatigue and hopelessness that providers experience in the face of medically futile care.