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Nurses and COVID-19: Ethical Considerations in Pandemic Care

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Editors:
  1. Connie M. Ulrich

    1. School of Nursing and Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Christine Grady

    1. Clinical Center, Department of Bioethics, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, USA

    View editor publications

    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Is the first book on the ethical challenges faced by nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic

  • Presents a broad range of ethical issues that nurses confronted during the COVID-19 pandemic

  • Stresses the importance of nursing care for the well-being of patients and families

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Connie M. Ulrich, Christine Grady
    Pages 1-5

  3. What Are Acceptable Risks during a Pandemic?

    • Connie M. Ulrich
    Pages 7-17

  4. Dying in Isolation

    • Anessa M. Foxwell
    Pages 19-33

  5. Preparing to Make Difficult Choices: Nursing Triage Decisions and Crisis Standards of Care during COVID-19

    • Aliza Narva, Kristen Maloney
    Pages 35-51

  6. The Emotional and Moral Remnants of COVID-19: Burnout, Moral Distress, and Mental Health Concerns

    • Christine Grady
    Pages 53-62

  7. Unanticipated Consequences: Lack of Essential and Nonessential Patient Care, Furloughs of Health Care Providers, and Institutional Financial Losses

    • Jeannette A. Rogowski
    Pages 63-76

  8. Lingering and Glaring Health Disparities Amidst COVID-19

    • Danielle McCamey, Nneka Sederstrom
    Pages 77-86

  9. Ethical Challenges for School Nurses during COVID-19

    • Ellen M. McCabe, Beth E. Jameson
    Pages 87-103

  10. Global Health Ethics: Nursing Voices from China and Brazil

    • Naixue Cui, Ruijie Shan, Hongyue Shen, Chaojin Da, Yingjuan Cao, Regina Szylit et al.
    Pages 105-142

  11. Moving Forward: Words of Wisdom from Nurse Leaders

    • Christine Grady, Connie M. Ulrich, Liz Stokes, Eileen Sullivan Marx, Elizabeth Bridges, Sarah Delgado
    Pages 143-151
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Keywords

About this book

This book addresses the many ethical issues and extraordinary risks that nurses and others are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, which creates physical, emotional, and economic burdens, affecting nurses' overall health and well-being. Nurses are essential front-line clinicians across all health care settings and in every nation. The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel SARs-CoV-2 virus has affected children, adults, and communities within and across all societies. Nurses, too, have contracted the virus and died from the disease. They have also seen their colleagues, family members, and friends hospitalized or in intensive care units struggling to survive. Nursing’s professionalism and disciplinary resolve to care for patients and families amidst confusion, misinformation, and shifting guidelines has been called “heroic” by the public. 
How much risk should nurses be expected to accept during a pandemic? How do nurses help patients and families find comfort and dignity at the end-of-life? How do we help nurses who are suffering from moral distress and mental health concerns from what they have seen, been asked to do, or are unable to provide?  And, how does society move forward from a pandemic that has challenged our basic ethical principles of justice and what is “fair, good and right” in caring for those who need care, including the most vulnerable and nurses themselves?  This book addresses these and other ethical concerns that nurses are facing in their day-to-day clinical practice; experiences shared with patients, families, and colleagues. Although this book was written while the pandemic was still raging across the United States and globally, the events needed to be told as they were unfolding. 


This book helps us to learn from both the successes and failures that are affecting so many across the globe, including those on whom the public relies on to provide quality, compassionate, and expert care when they are sick: nurses. 

Editors and Affiliations

  • School of Nursing and Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Connie M. Ulrich

  • Clinical Center, Department of Bioethics, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, USA

    Christine Grady

About the editors

Dr. Connie M. Ulrich is the Lillian S. Brunner Chair in Medical and Surgical Nursing and a Professor of Bioethics and Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing with a secondary appointment in the Perelman School of Medicine, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy.  Dr. Ulrich was trained in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the Department of Bioethics. Her national and international bioethics program of research has focused on advancing empirical bioethics in both clinical practice and research using innovative mixed methodology approaches.  She has received funding for her work from the National Institutes of Nursing Research, National Cancer Institute, and other federal and state agencies. Dr. Ulrich has published in leading medical, nursing, and bioethics peer-review journals; and has published a book on “Everyday ethics: ethical issues and stress in nursing practice.”  Her most recent book, published by Springer Nature with her colleague Dr. Christine Grady is entitled “Moral distress among the Healthcare Professions.” 


Dr. Christine Grady is a nurse-bioethicist and a senior investigator who currently serves as the Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Her research is both conceptual and empirical and primarily in the ethics of clinical research, including informed consent, vulnerability, study design, recruitment, and international research ethics, as well as ethical issues faced by nurses and other health care providers. Dr. Grady has authored more than 175 papers in the biomedical and bioethics literature and authored or edited several books, including The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics. She served from 2010-2017 as a Commissioner on the President's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center and of the American Academy of Nursing, a senior research fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. She serves as an attending on the Bioethics Consultation service, an IRB and DSMB member, and a member of several editorial boards. 



Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Nurses and COVID-19: Ethical Considerations in Pandemic Care

  • Editors: Connie M. Ulrich, Christine Grady

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82113-5

  • Publisher: Springer Cham

  • eBook Packages: Medicine, Medicine (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-82112-8Published: 26 April 2022

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-82113-5Published: 25 April 2022

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: IX, 151

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Nursing Ethics, Epidemiology, Bioethics

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