Abstract
To know the strategies of resistance adopted by nursing staff, facing situations of moral distress, from an ethical perspective. The authors conducted qualitative research through semi-structured interviews, with fifteen nursing staff members of a university hospital in the extreme south of Brazil, using textual discourse analysis and the theoretical reference of Foucault. Two categories were constructed: denial of oneself and the other - in which one perceives that the nursing staff can perform actions that are governed predominantly by immobility and conformism, avoiding confrontations with whoever represents power in situations that provoke moral distress in them; possibility to care for oneself and for the other - in which nursing workers in situations that provoke moral distress for them exercise power and endurance. it was perceived that some professionals seem to use ethical coping strategies, in order to ensure and preserve their professional values. However, often the choice of some nursing professionals may be to relapse into immobility and the absence of building strategies of endurance. This situation may represent their reduced exercise of power and insufficient resistance in the face of ethical problems, contributing to the intensification of their invisibility in the area of health.
Highlights
In daily professional life, many situations seem to reflect suffering and distress for the nursing staff
The nursing professional can experience intense discomfort, not always understood clearly and precisely, which can be identified as moral distress (MD), a feeling resulting from inconsistency between his actions and his personal and professional convictions[2,3]
The study demonstrates that, in daily work, when faced with MD, the nursing staff may perform actions that were guided predominantly by immobility and conformism, avoiding direct confrontation with those www.eerp.usp.br/rlae who are in power in situations they experienced
Summary
Many situations seem to reflect suffering and distress for the nursing staff. In the daily professional routine, several clashes are required of the nursing staff, from the protection of patients, the interests of health institutions, even their own personal needs and desires, often forgotten or trivialized, related to the exercise of autonomy, the care of oneself and the other, involving relationships of power and resistance simultaneously, commonly not even perceived These relationships present immediacy as an outstanding feature, and that permits and sustains the differences, segregates everything that makes an individual an individual, separating him from his relationships with others, fragmenting it from everyday life and connecting it to himself, reinforcing his own identity, not always positively[5]
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