ArticleJournal of medical ethics and history of medicine2025
Explicating the process of moral courage in clinical nurses: a grounded theory study.
Article in Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Moral courage in nurses is the product of a complex process and can be enhanced by identifying the steps through which nurses make morally courageous decisions. This qualitative study aimed to explicate the process of moral courage in clinical nurses and present a descriptive model. The study was conducted in Shahrekord University of Medical Sciences in 2022 using the grounded theory approach. Twenty-one clinical nurses were selected through purposive and theoretical sampling. Data were analyzed using Strauss and Corbin's 2015 approach and data management was supported by MAXQDA software (version 11). The core variable identified was moral excellence. When faced with a misalignment between authority and responsibility, nurses experience ambiguity in ethical decision-making. The nurses in this study employed spirituality, legality, and self-sacrifice strategies, which helped them to manage system expectations. In this model, moral courage ultimately gravitates toward managing system expectations-a deviant mechanism failing to yield positive outcomes due to organizational infrastructures and conditions. Therefore, it is recommended that healthcare organizations address factors contributing to ambiguity in nurses' decision-making, such as lack of operational protocols for ethical decisions, mismatched expectations and responsibilities, and deficiencies in professional autonomy.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.