Ethical difficulties in nursing, educational needs and attitudes about using ethics resources.

Ethical difficulties arise in health care practices. However, despite extensive research findings that demonstrate that most nurses are involved in recurrent ethical problems, institutions are not always able to effectively support nursing operators. The limited availability of ethics consultation services and traditional nursing training fail to meet the frequent and strong requests by health workers to support their ethical dilemmas. A questionnaire was administered to 374 nurses attending a specialist training and a lifetime learning programme in Italy. The respondents reported a high frequency of ethically sensitive situations, and they described the poor development of ethics support and a scarcity of ethics training programmes. The results suggest the importance of promoting ethics services that include consultation and ethics training. A need for systematic ethics educational activities was identified for improving the capacity of nurses to manage ethical issues in patient care.