A new article highlights ethical challenges that nurses face in their profession when more and more clinical trials are conducted on cancer patients.
Nursing alone is stressful. Studies have shown how heavy workload and being pressed for time can cause moral blindness and emotional immunization among nurses. In clinical trials, the situation is even more complicated, due to dual professional roles. The nurses have to accommodate both the values of care and the values of research. Caring for cancer patients coincides with recruiting patients as research participants and coordinating clinical trials on them according to detailed research protocols.
The article by Tove Godskesen et al. describes challenges faced by nurses burdened with this dual professional identity. The most difficult challenges concern cancer patients near the end of life, who no longer respond to the standard therapy. They often hope desperately that research participation will give them access to the next generation of cancer drugs, which may work more efficiently on them. This unrealistic hope creates difficulties for the nurses. They must recruit cancer patients to clinical trials, while the patients often are so terminally ill that they, from a perspective of caring, perhaps rather should be allowed to end their lives in peace and quiet.
An additional complication, next to the heavy workload in nursing and the dual identity as a nurse in the service of research, is that the number of clinical trials increases. There is a political ambition to accelerate the development, to support the Nordic pharmaceutical industry. This means that more and more nurses are engaged to coordinate trials: a task for which they rarely were trained, for which they hardly have time to prepare, and over which they lack power, given their position in the hierarchy of healthcare.
In view of the political ambition to increase the number of clinical trials, there should be a corresponding ambition to support the increasing number of nurses who will have to assume dual professional roles. Godskesen’s study indicates that there is a lack of systematic strategies to handle the situation. Nurses who coordinate trials on patients support each other, to the best of their abilities, over a quick cup of coffee.
Godskesen recommends more strategic training and better support for nurses working with clinical trials. For the nurses’ sake, and not least for the sake of patient safety.
Tove E. Godskesen, Suzanne Petri, Stefan Eriksson, Arja Halkoaho, Margrete Mangset, Merja Pirinen, Zandra Engelbak Nielsen. 2018. When Nursing Care and Clinical Trials Coincide: A Qualitative Study of the Views of Nordic Oncology and Hematology Nurses on Ethical Work Challenges. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics. doi.org/10.1177/1556264618783555
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