Ethical issues which arise during the running of neonatal units

Neonatal intensive care units are sensitive units where continuous observation-care-treatment practices are applied with complicated equipment by a crowded team. Sometimes, situations-problems regarding medical ethics come up while providing multidisciplinary health service in these units. Within this thesis study, particular situations-problems associated with the neonatal intensive care units are defined on a theoretical basis and a research has been carried out to determine related experiences and evaluations of unit staff members. Within the framework of our research, we prepared a data collecting form including six descriptive information questions and 20 statements to be evaluated. It was applied to 91 health professionals working permanently except physicians in two neonatal intensive care units (Çukurova University Balcalı Hospital and Private Metro Hospital) in Adana city center in September, 2014. For each statement on ethics related problems, participants were asked to state the situations they met the problem in and the level of importance they attached to it. Results show that the participants often encounter related problems and they generally consider them important. Most frequently encountered problems are assigning physician's duties to nurses, loading junior workers with "drudgery" and working long shifts. Most important problems are not getting informed consent forms signed, not providing families with clear and detailed information and working long shifts. There is a substantial parallelism between the encountering frequency and the order of points of importance. Rule violations both in terms of encountering frequency and the level of importance take precedence over value conflicts of dilemmas. In conclusion, it is possible to state that the participants have ethic sensitivity and that they encounter and care about not only full ethic problems and also even the practice problems which also have an ethical dimension.