Prevalence of principled thinking by critical care nurses.

The advanced technology surrounding the nursing care of the acutely ill patient has precipitated many ethical issues. The first step in understanding how nurses respond to these ethical issues is to become familiar with their moral reasoning and use of ethical principles in making decisions. This research report describes the responses of critical care nurses to six vignettes of the Nursing Dilemma Test as a measure of their use of principled thinking to decide on actions in specific ethical situations. Nurses used principled thinking more often to respond to ethical situations than purely practical responses.