The effect of education in nurse’s moral sensitivity

Abstract

Nursing is a moral effort and moral sensitivity is essential as the first step in moral decision-making process. Teaching moral sensitivity is considered as one of the most important methods to reinforce moral decision making of nurses, thus the aim of this research was to examine the effect of education in nurses moral sensitivity. The current study is a controlled clinical trial study which was done in an interventional way. All of the working nurses of Persian Gulf Martyrdom Hospital in Bushehr city in 1396 were the sampling population of this study. 68 nurses were participated in this research as the samples. They were selected by available sampling method and then were assigned in control and experiment groups randomly. The Lutzen nurses' moral sensitivity questionnaire (MSQ) was used in this study tool. The validity and reliability of this questionnaire is confirmed. Both experiment and control groups did the pre-test. An eight hour training session was held for the experiment group. Both groups did the post-test. The data were coded and analyzed by SPSS software edition 19. Descriptive indicators, T-test, chi-square, and paired sample T-test was used to analyze the data. The mean score of nurses' moral sensitivity, before intervention, was not significant statistically for both groups (P=0.570) and both groups were similar. The comparison of moral sensitivity score mean after intervention with independent T-test showed that the score mean of nurses' moral sensitivity is significantly different in experiment and control groups after intervention (P<.001). The results of this study showed that transferring knowledge and education improves the nurses' moral sensitivity and therefore the inclusion of this material in nursing curriculums as an educational tool can be a step toward facilitating moral sensitivity training to nurses