Nursing Advocacy Attitudes in Italian Nurses.

This study was aimed at analyzing how sex, age, work experience, post-degree training, shift, and ward assignment could influence nursing advocacy attitudes, based on current literature. The study consisted of all Italian nurses, currently employed both in private and public health care settings, who were invited to participate in this study. Advocacy is recognized as an action where an advocate attempts to support another in his/her legal and ethical circumstance in order to represent and protect the interests of the patient (Grace, 2001). The advocacy concept has been evident in the nursing context since the 1970s, when it was added into nursing ethical codes (Baldwin, 2003; Mallik & Rafferty, 2000). Advocacy could be widely adopted in other health care professions, in order to guarantee the interest and rights of individuals (Graham, 2012). In the nursing context, advocacy practice became more sophisticated, because nurses should consider the health condition of both the individual and the community (Grace, 2001). Additionally, nurses might mediate between these two dimensions (Chafey et al., 1998), by encouraging the patient while protecting patient autonomy, rights, and vulnerabilities and facilitating immediate access to available resources (Blondeau et al., 2000; Gadow, 1990; Hem & Heggen, 2004; Leino-Kilpi et al., 2015; Schwartz, 2002; Snowball, 1996; Yonge & Molzahn, 2002). The result highlighted an important goal in the nursing professionalizing approach (Hagan & Donovan, 2013; Söderhamn & Idvall, 2003; Long, 2005; Welchman & Griener, 2005), as well as clinical settings (Abbaszadeh et al., 2013) and its related perspectives (Motamed-Jahromi et al., 2012). Several key concepts have been recognized besides the nursing advocacy concept, as well as protecting patients’ autonomy, availability of health care resources, safety, and quality of patient care (Bu & Jezewski, 2007; Kalaitzidis & Jewell, 2020). By understanding nurses’ advocacy competencies might indicate a direction for nursing practice, education, and research subdimensions.