Moral fatigue--a nursing perspective.

Abstract

It is perhaps inevitable that a phenomenon called moral fatigue would be labeled, described, and applied to nurses, whose working environment has more than its share of moral conflicts. When professionals' duties to patients and their families--duties that are caught up in uncertainty and fast-paced institutional and cultural change--are made to seem irrelevant to the patients' real needs, the resulting discomfort of professionals is generally called moral distress. This article explores the dimensions of moral distress among nurses and presents moral fatigue as a holistic experience with both personal and institutional consequences.