Abstract

The Survey of Nursing Students Ethical Sensitivity

Ali Reza Salar, Sadegh Zare and Ebrahim Sharifzadeh

With the increase in the consideration for the ethical issues and challenges existing in health catering environments, the health care personnel find themselves in complicated and intricate situations resulting from ethical problems. The present study has been performed with the objective of finding the status of ethical sensitivity in nursing students? decision-making. The present study is a descriptive-analytical research, which was performed on 140 nurses who had been selected based on a clustering random method. To collect information for the present study a questionnaire was used, which consisted of two parts. The data were analyzed using SPSS 19 and descriptive statistics, Pierson correlation, variance analysis, and independent t-test. The students? average age was 21.37 6 3.24, and among all of these individuals, 50 were women and 79 people were single. The overall ethical sensitivity mean among the students was 55.79 6 17.28, which was in an intermediate level according to the questionnaire classification. The relationship between marital status and age with ethical sensitivity in decision-making and each of its aspects was not significant (p < 0.05), but the relationship between gender and ethical sensitivity was significant. Due to the fact that the ethical sensitivity among the students studied in the present research is in an intermediate level, it is suggested that the officials should think of methods that improve such a situation, for instance, by holding workshops for the nursing students.