MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4410272350 · doi:10.1177/09697330251339417

Ethical challenges nurses faced during the COVID-19 pandemic: Scoping review

2025· review· en· W4410272350 on OpenAlexaff
Ebin J Arries, Bernadette Dierckx de Casterlé, Mary‐Anne Ramis, Riitta Suhonen, Carla Aparecida Arena Ventura, Georgina Morley

Bibliographic record

VenueNursing Ethics · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicDisaster Response and Management
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Regina
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCINAHLPsycINFOScopusMEDLINEWorkforceSystematic reviewPsychologyMedicineNursingMedical educationPolitical sciencePsychological intervention

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Nurses encountered a myriad of ethical challenges during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as allocation of scarce resources, the need to balance duty of care with safety of self as well as visitation restrictions. The impact of these challenges on the nursing workforce requires investigation. The aim of this review was to scope and describe the reported literature on ethical challenges faced by nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, including contextual characteristics and strategies reported to address these challenges. The review was conducted in accordance with JBI methods for scoping reviews and reported using PRISMA-ScR guidance. A published protocol guided conduct of the review. The following databases were searched for eligible studies from November 2019 to January 2023: PubMed, CINAHL, Ovid, PsycINFO, the Cochrane Library, and Scopus. No language restrictions were applied. Studies were reviewed for inclusion by two independent reviewers, and a data extraction form was developed to extract data relevant to the review questions. Results were analyzed and presented according to the concepts of interest, using tables, figures, and supporting narrative synthesis. After searching the databases, 2150 citations were retrieved with 47 studies included in the review. Studies represented 23 countries across five continents. Most of the studies used qualitative designs. Ethical challenges were described in several ways, often without appealing to common ethics language or terms. Few studies reported on strategies to address the specific challenges, which may reflect the dynamic nature of the pandemic. The scoping review highlights the complex and, at times, overwhelming impact of ethical challenges faced by nurses across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from the review can be used as a basis for further research to explore, develop, and implement strategies to address ethical challenges faced by nurses during future public health crises.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.014
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesResearch integrity
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.503
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.014
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0030.013
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.680
GPT teacher head0.661
Teacher spread0.020 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueNursing EthicsSame topicDisaster Response and ManagementFrench-language works237,207