Navigating towards a moral horizon: a multisite qualitative study of ethical practice in nursing.

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study of nurses' ethical decision-making. Focus groups of nurses in diverse practice contexts were used as a means to explore the meaning of ethics and the enactment of ethical practice. The findings centre on the metaphor ofa moral horizon--the horizon representing "the good" towards which the nurses were navigating.The findings suggest that currents within the moral climate of nurses' work significantly influence nurses' progress towards their moral horizon. All too often the nurses found themselves navigating against a current characterized by the privileging of biomedicine and a corporate ethos. Conversely, a current of supportive colleagues as well as professional guidelines and standards and ethics education helped them to move towards their horizon.The implications for nursing practice and for our understanding of ethical decision-making are discussed.

Navigating towards a moral horizon: a multisite qualitative study of ethical practice in nursing.

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study of nurses' ethical decision-making. Focus groups of nurses in diverse practice contexts were used as a means to explore the meaning of ethics and the enactment of ethical practice. The findings centre on the metaphor of a moral horizon--the horizon representing "the good" towards which the nurses were navigating. The findings suggest that currents within the moral climate of nurses' work significantly influence nurses' progress towards their moral horizon. All too often, the nurses found themselves navigating against a current characterized by the privileging of biomedicine and a corporate ethos. Conversely, a current of supportive colleagues as well as professional guidelines and standards and ethics education helped them to move towards their horizon. The implications for nursing practice and for our understanding of ethical decision-making are discussed.

Keeping it together: how women use the biomedical explanatory model to manage the stigma of depression.

Although considerable research has been conducted on women who are depressed, the actual experiences and voices of women have not been central to this research. Therefore little is known about how women make sense of depression as they live with and manage it in their daily lives. Our purposes in doing this study were to (1) examine how women experience and manage depression and treatment, and (2) investigate the core components of women's explanatory models of depression (including beliefs about etiology, onset of symptoms, pathophysiology, course of illness, and treatment needs). We interviewed 43 women living in a small city in Western Canada who had sought treatment within the previous five years. Data were analyzed using the constant comparison method of grounded theory. In this paper we will focus on the core concept, Keeping it Together, and its three supporting categories, (1) Taking Up a Biomedical Explanation for Depression, (2) Using the Biomedical Explanatory Model (BEM) to Manage the Stigma of Depression, and (3) The Inadvertent Effects of Adopting a BEM.