When health practitioners' moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints, they may respond with feelings of moral distress. In a Canadian hermeneutic phenomenological study, physicians, nurses, psychologists and non-professional aides were asked to identify care situations that they found morally distressing, and to elaborate on how moral concerns regarding the care of patients were raised and resolved. In this paper, we describe the experience of moral distress related by nurses working in mental healthcare settings who believed that lack of resources (such as time and staff) leads to dispiritedness, lack of respect, and absence of recognition (for both patients and staff) which severely diminished their ability to provide quality care. The metaphors of flashlight and hammer are used to elaborate nurses' possible responses to intolerable situations.

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This paper is designed to generate discussion related to the invisibility of Black nurse leaders by providing an understanding of the historical experiences of Black people, their entry into the nursing profession and the present day challenges they face. This discussion will inform health care practice, policy, and structuring by identifying the barriers to leadership for Black nurses.

As health care institutions continue to promote diversity initiatives within the context of Family-Centered and Woman-Centered Care, the taken-for-grantedness of heteronormativity and homophobia remain pervasive in health care practices, including those of perinatal nurses, to the extent that nurses' relationships with lesbian birthing couples are often thwarted. Attending to the complexities of queer (lesbian) orientations embedded in the philosophical tenets of feminist and queer phenomenology, this article draws upon experiential findings derived from interview data to understand lesbian couples' relationships with perinatal nurses in the context of birthing care in eastern Canada.