Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to describe the nature of ethical issues encountered by nurses working on medical/surgical nursing units and the degree to which they found these issues disturbing. Relationships among demographic variables and nurses’ experience with specific ethical issues were also examined. A survey of a stratified random sample of 400 Registered Nurses in British Columbia working on medical/surgical nursing units was completed. The “Survey of Ethical Issues in Nursing - Revised” (SEIN - R) and a demographic form were mailed to each participant. Two hundred and two questionnaires (50.5%) were returned and 196 (49%) used in the analysis. The findings indicate that nurses perceive that they “rarely” encountered ethical issues as identified in the instrument. The five most frequently encountered ethical issues that nurses reported were: (1) unsafe staffing patterns, (2) family demands for futile treatment, (3) prolongation of life when death was inevitable, (4) unprofessional conduct of a colleague, and (5) disagreements with physicians over patient care. Overall, nurses reported being at least “somewhat” disturbed about the ethical issues they encountered or would have become so if they had encountered these situations in the practice setting. When asked to identify how disturbed they were or would be by the 26 ethical issues included in the SEIN - R, the five most disturbing issues were: (1) working with physicians who demonstrated inadequate knowledge and skills, (2) unsafe staffing patterns, (3) prolongation of life when death was inevitable, (4) caring for a patient whose family was demanding futile treatment, and (5) knowing that information about a patient’s prognosis was being withheld from the patient and/or family. The findings also suggest that a number of statistically significant but weak relationships exist between the five most frequent and the five most disturbing ethical issues, and select demographics. The most common resource nurses use when addressing ethical issues is their nursing colleagues. Relatively few nurses used their Canadian Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nursing to guide them in their ethical decision-making; more used the Registered Nurses Association of British Columbia Standards for Nursing Practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.090 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".