Disrupted Value System among Nursing Care Managers: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Introduction: The degradation of moral and professional values and incompatibility between value and performance affects the individual’s value, and leads healthcare staff to completely abandon the profession. Aim: To investigate the experience of nursing care managers regarding the disrupted value system. Materials and Methods: In this qualitative research paper, data were collected using semi-structured interviews with nursing care managers. Content analysis (based on Graneheim and Lundman’s approach) was utilised in data analyses. A total of 14 Iranian nurses with at least five-year experience of working in the hospital as nursing managers participated in this study. Results: The data analysis revealed one main category “disrupted value system” and two subcategories “impaired moral integrity and breaking the moral framework”. The findings of the study indicated that the experience of nursing care managers in disrupted value system is associated with the sense of ignoring own beliefs, distortion of learned values, distortion of transparency, emptiness, victimisation, scarifying for the organisation, failure to observe the ethical framework and rules, ignoring ethical principles and moral degradation. Conclusion: Nursing care managers experience a great deal of moral distress on a daily basis and despite their efforts to manage and tolerate these distresses, they suffer from many psychological complications. The results of this research can propose new meanings of disrupted value system, and thus facilitate the plans to control and reduce it based on new meaning.

Keywords

• ethics
• moral
• nurse managers