Driven by interests in workforce planning and patient safety, a growing body of literature has begun to identify the reality and the prevalence of missed nursing care, also specified as care left undone, rationed care or unfinished care. Empirical studies and conceptual considerations have focused on structural issues such as staffing, as well as on outcome issues - missed care/unfinished care. Philosophical and ethical aspects of unfinished care are largely unexplored. Thus, while internationally studies highlight instances of covert rationing/missed care/care left undone - suggesting that nurses, in certain contexts, are actively engaged in rationing care - in terms of the nursing and nursing ethics literature, there appears to be a dearth of explicit decision-making frameworks within which to consider rationing of nursing care. In reality, the assumption of policy makers and health service managers is that nurses will continue to provide full care - despite reducing staffing levels and increased patient turnover, dependency and complexity of care. Often, it would appear that rationing/missed care/nursing care left undone is a direct response to overwhelming demands on the nursing resource in specific contexts. A discussion of resource allocation and rationing in nursing therefore seems timely. The aim of this discussion paper is to consider the ethical dimension of issues of resource allocation and rationing as they relate to nursing care and the distribution of the nursing resource.
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Aims To investigate how nursing experts and experts from other health professions understand the concept of rationing/missed/unfinished nursing care and how this is compared at a cross‐cultural level. Design The mixed methods descriptive study. Methods The semi‐structured questionnaires were sent to the sample of 45 scholars and practitioners from 26 countries. Data were collected from November 2017–February 2018. Results Assigning average cultural values to participants from each country revealed three cultural groups: high individualism‐high masculinity, high individualism‐low masculinity and low individualism‐medium masculinity. Content analysis of the findings revealed three main themes, which were identified across cultural clusters: (a) projecting blame for the phenomenon: Blaming the nurse versus blaming the system; (b) intentionality versus unintentionality; and (c) focus on nurses in comparison to focus on patients. Conclusion Consistent differences in the understanding of missed nursing care can be understood in line with the nation's standing on two main cultural values: individualism and masculinity. Impact The findings call for scholars' caution in interpreting missed nursing care from different cultures, or in comparing levels and types of missed nursing tasks across nations. The findings further indicated that mimicking interventions to limit missed nursing care from one cultural context to the other might be ineffective. Interventions to mitigate the phenomenon should be implemented thoughtfully, considering the cultural aspects.
Background Demographic, economic and organisational changes challenge home care services. Increased use of welfare technology and involvement of family members as co-producers of care are political initiatives to meet these challenges. However, these initiatives also involve ethical aspects. Method The aim of this qualitative study was to explore family caregivers’ experience of involvement and possible ethical aspects of caring for frail older family members receiving home care services supported by welfare technology. This study used a qualitative explorative and descriptive design within a phenomenological-hermeneutical approach. Sixteen interviews with eighteen family caregivers were conducted. The participants were sons, daughters, siblings and spouses of frail older people receiving home care services with the support of welfare technology. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The COREQ checklist was used. Results The analysis led to five main themes. First, the family caregivers’ experienced caring as meaningful but increasingly demanding concerning the changes in home care services. Second, they experienced a change in relationships, roles, tasks, and responsibilities related to more family involvement and the use of welfare technology. This also challenged their sense of autonomy. However, welfare technology helped them deal with responsibilities, especially safety. The family caregivers requested early involvement, dialogue for care decisions, more cooperation and support from health professionals. Third, the participants experienced that health professionals decided the conditions for co-production without discussion. Their need for information and knowledge about welfare technology were not met. Fourth, the family caregivers felt that the health professionals did not adequately recognise their unique knowledge of the care receiver and did not use this knowledge for customising the welfare technology to the care receiver and their families. Fifth, the family caregivers expressed concern about service and welfare technology inequality in home care services. Conclusions Co-production in the involvement of family caregivers in care is still not an integral part of home care service. Welfare technology was appreciated, but the family caregivers called for early involvement to ensure successful and safe implementation and use. More attention needs to be given to ethical concerns about the change in relations, transfer of tasks and responsibility, and risk of inequality.
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