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Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Efforts to curb spread of COVID-19 has led to restrictive visitor policies in healthcare, which disrupt social connection between patients and their families at end of life. We interviewed 17 Canadian nurses providing palliative care, to solicit their descriptions of, and responses to, ethical issue...

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Autores principales: McMillan, Kim, Wright, David K., McPherson, Christine J., Ma, Kristina, Bitzas, Vasiliki
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8573617/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34761076
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23333936211051702
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author McMillan, Kim
Wright, David K.
McPherson, Christine J.
Ma, Kristina
Bitzas, Vasiliki
author_facet McMillan, Kim
Wright, David K.
McPherson, Christine J.
Ma, Kristina
Bitzas, Vasiliki
author_sort McMillan, Kim
collection PubMed
description Efforts to curb spread of COVID-19 has led to restrictive visitor policies in healthcare, which disrupt social connection between patients and their families at end of life. We interviewed 17 Canadian nurses providing palliative care, to solicit their descriptions of, and responses to, ethical issues experienced as a result of COVID-19 related circumstances. Our analysis was inductive and scaffolded on notions of nurses’ moral agency, palliative care values, and our clinical practice in end-of-life care. Our findings reveal that while participants appreciated the need for pandemic measures, they found blanket policies separating patients and families to be antithetical to their philosophy of palliative care. In navigating this tension, nurses drew on the foundational values of their practice, engaging in ethical reasoning and action to integrate safety and humanity into their work. These findings underscore the epistemic agency of nurses and highlight the limits of a purely biomedical logic for guiding the nursing ethics of the pandemic response.
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spelling pubmed-85736172021-11-09 Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic McMillan, Kim Wright, David K. McPherson, Christine J. Ma, Kristina Bitzas, Vasiliki Glob Qual Nurs Res Single-Method Research Article Efforts to curb spread of COVID-19 has led to restrictive visitor policies in healthcare, which disrupt social connection between patients and their families at end of life. We interviewed 17 Canadian nurses providing palliative care, to solicit their descriptions of, and responses to, ethical issues experienced as a result of COVID-19 related circumstances. Our analysis was inductive and scaffolded on notions of nurses’ moral agency, palliative care values, and our clinical practice in end-of-life care. Our findings reveal that while participants appreciated the need for pandemic measures, they found blanket policies separating patients and families to be antithetical to their philosophy of palliative care. In navigating this tension, nurses drew on the foundational values of their practice, engaging in ethical reasoning and action to integrate safety and humanity into their work. These findings underscore the epistemic agency of nurses and highlight the limits of a purely biomedical logic for guiding the nursing ethics of the pandemic response. SAGE Publications 2021-11-03 /pmc/articles/PMC8573617/ /pubmed/34761076 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23333936211051702 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Single-Method Research Article
McMillan, Kim
Wright, David K.
McPherson, Christine J.
Ma, Kristina
Bitzas, Vasiliki
Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic
title Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic
title_full Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic
title_fullStr Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic
title_full_unstemmed Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic
title_short Visitor Restrictions, Palliative Care, and Epistemic Agency: A Qualitative Study of Nurses’ Relational Practice During the Coronavirus Pandemic
title_sort visitor restrictions, palliative care, and epistemic agency: a qualitative study of nurses’ relational practice during the coronavirus pandemic
topic Single-Method Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8573617/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34761076
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23333936211051702
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