Before starting the assignments, I had a basic understanding of the nurses role for the contribution of ethical research but it was expanded on. The CITI trainings provided a lot of specific cases for conducting research in instances that my brain wouldn’t have thought of on my own, like research conducted in another country, or with prisoners. I don’t plan on working in those settings as a researcher anytime soon but I feel comfortable in the fact that there are standards and guidelines in place.
I think the course objectives related to utilizing research databases and systematic appraisal of evidence (Course objectives 1 and 2) will help me in the future with being able to participate in the evidence-based practice initiatives because I more knowledge about the infrastructure of data bases and I got more practice in collecting and evaluating sources. I think going through the video series about the CLAPSI EBP initiative and then going through the steps on our own was helpful. The fact that we were able to use a systematic approach for evaluating different types of articles (qualitative v qualitative) was very practical and can stay with me in my following courses and career as a nurse.
I felt that there was overlap between the nursing code of ethics we had looked at in other classes and the ethics needed generally to conduct ethical research. It’s a nice thought, a probably a good thing, that nurse’s are held to such a high standard on the day to day. Especially when nursing contributions to research is seen in the context of direct patient care. The movie “Miss Ever’s Boys”, the directors did a good job of highlighting the role Nurse Ever had in carrying out the Tuskegee experiment and where she faced ethical choices. I don’t know how much of the movie was true to real life, but at one point Nurse Ever was so conflicted about the ethics involved in not treating the members of the study that she broke into her old ward to steal penicillin for a member who was starting to move into the third stage of syphilis. Although Nurse Ever knew that the experiment was wrong, she chose to give the best care she could within the confines of the experiment. She stayed with the patient during a spinal tap and helped the participants understand the lingo the doctors were using.
It important for nurses to learn about and learn from ethical crises in the past in order to not repeat them in the future. There were clear ethical and moral failings in the Tuskegee Syphilis study, but they were failings done by nurses and doctors just like us and we would be naive to think that we are above making any mistakes like the medical team involved in the research. This reminds me of the Milgram experiment, where participants were led to believe that they were delivering lethal doses of electricity to another participant because they were told to by a researcher. The Milgram experiment was supposed to investigate the psychology behind how ordinary German’s followed the Nazis and if Americans would be fall into a similar trap of obeying authorities orders even when they are clearly wrong. Everyone likes to think that they would be the exception, that they wouldn’t listen but statistically speaking they won’t be. The same principals apply to ethics in research, in healthcare, and in life.
