Challenges faced by nurses and their stress of conscience levels in providing palliative care: a cross-sectional descriptive study

To reveal the challenges faced by nurses providing palliative care to hospitalized patients and to determine their levels of stress of conscience while delivering palliative care. In this cross-sectional and descriptive study, a total of 143 nurses providing palliative care in the intensive care and oncology units of a university hospital were included in the study. The Nurses Descriptive Characteristics Form, Palliative Care Difficulties Scale and Stress of Conscience Questionnaire were used to collect the data. In the analysis of the data, arithmetic mean, Cronbach’s alpha, Independent Samples t-test, Analysis of Variance test, Mann Whitney test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman’s Correlation were used. The mean age of the participants was 31.26 ± 6.88 years. While 25.9% of them defined the concept of conscience as “compassion”, 21.0% defined it as “empathy”. The mean scores they obtained from the Stress of Conscience Questionnaire and the Palliative Care Difficulties Scale were 86.8 ± 48.7 and 42.6 ± 8.3, respectively. There was no statistically significant relationship between the scores they obtained from the overall the Palliative Care Difficulties Scale and the Stress of Conscience Questionnaire (p > 0.05). The relationship between the participants’ the Palliative Care Difficulties Scale scores and the variables such as sex, and the department they work in was statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05). The results of this study revealed that nurses providing palliative care should be supported, and that being female and having a postgraduate education positively affected conscience. It may be recommended to focus on ethical issues related to palliative care in undergraduate and graduate education. Nurses providing palliative care in areas such as intensive care and oncology encounter numerous ethical issues and experience moral distress while maintaining effective communication with their patients and ensuring continuity of care. Supporting these nurses through national and international policies will positively impact the quality of care.