The attitudes of nurses from an intensive care unit in the face of errors: an approach in light of bioethics

Abstract

This study analyzed the attitudes of nurses concerning the occurrence of errors in nursing procedures carried out in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) based on the bioethics framework. This descriptive study with qualitative approach was carried out with 14 nurses from a private hospital in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Results were analyzed according to Bardin’s proposal of content analysis. The resulting themes were: acknowledging one’s fallibility; acknowledging and reporting errors; hiding errors. The nurses’ reports are based on considerations through the lens of bioethics: taking responsibility for an error implies acknowledging one’s own vulnerabilities; acknowledging an error with responsibility implies ethical conditions in the relationships among those involved; and errors are in the context of a particular environment. This study enables re-thinking nursing practice based on bioethics, resorting to the analysis of errors focusing on the relationships between those involved.