Untruthful Nurses

Modern health care systems and advanced legislation have challenged nurses in truthful information-giving to patients. This research aimed to address the gap in knowledge about ethical issues that require nurses to tell the ‘truth’ to patients. The methodology of this study was based on Husserl’s philosophical approach and methodology of phenomenology. The phenomenological analysis was a reduction process of in-depth interview data. The main results were: 1.Nurses felt they were not autonomous in their moral decisions and were forced to conceal information for institutional reasons (protecting the ‘team’), 2. Nurses found themselves balancing patient-doctor relationship (choosing to protect the doctor), 3. Nurses were afraid of taking autonomous actions because they run the risk of reprimand (self-protection caused by fear), 4. Nurses were afraid of the impact of the whole truth on vulnerable patients (protecting the patient and themselves). Data led to the conclusion that nurses were not lying or deceiving as such: they were protecting. This book will elaborate ethical dilemma of truth-telling in health care and is suitable for ethics and qualitative research method text book.