Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine nurses' cognition of current issues in bioethics in our society. A questionnaire survay was conducted among nurses who were assuming leader roles in their work settings. The questionnaire consisted of the questions of 1) brain death, 2) organ transplant, 3) telling medical diagnosis to cancer patient, 4) informed consent, 5) concern about patient's rights in recent medical care, and 6) subject's own moral dilemmatic experiences. Data were obtained from a sample of 830 nurses including 481 nurse managers and administrators, 200 senior nursing staff, and 140 nurse educators (9 subjects gave no answer of their working position). Findings indicated that 48% of the subjects accepted brain death as the death of human being. On the other hand, the same ratio of the sample rejected brain death as the death of human being in present situation. The greatest amount of the rejectors (58%) mentioned "low reliability of fairness in judging brain death" as a reason of their rejection. 14% of the sample agreed on promotion of organ transplant, and 77% of the sample also agreed on the transplant on certain conditions. The top three conditions that the respondents listed were 1) effective practice of moral education for physicians, 2) fair function of human rights committee in medical organizations, and 3) making all the relevant data public. Subjects who agreed on telling diagnosis to cancer patients on no condition were only 10%, and 85% of the subjects claimed to set certain conditions for practice of telling truth. 70% of those subjects listed "patient's independency" as a major condition for the practice. Promotion of getting informed consent was supported by 56% of the subjects. Implications of those findings, and the subjects' concern about patient's rights and their own moral dilemmatic experiences were discussed.
