Mental Health Clinical Placement: Complementary Perspectives from Care Ethics

Nursing is a practice-based profession. The bookish approach dominant in the professional academic circles will not be adequate for a life-oriented discipline like nursing. This point is substantiated by an empirical study held in Mangalore, which carried profound implications for re-visioning nursing ethics. A study was conducted using the descriptive survey research (pre-placement and post-placement) to find out the change in attitude of the nursing students during the mental health clinical placement. The sample consisted of 100 3rd year B.Sc. nursing students selected by systematic random sampling method and data were collected by administering a structured questionnaire on attitude. The findings of the study revealed that there was significant difference in the attitude and perceived stress of nursing students before and after the mental health clinical placement (t99=1.66, P <0.05). The mean post placement attitude score (141.84) was greater than the mean pre-placement attitude score (107.68). The practical exposure can work miracles for nursing education in producing a praxis oriented transformation of the nurses. Care ethics is a topic that is extensively discussed in the circles of medical ethics. Care ethics refers to the ethical behavior of the care-givers especially, the nurses. Care ethics is often contrasted with the principlist approach in Western bioethics. The study seems to suggest, that, in contrast to principlism, the care approach is more suitable for nursing context, providing better scope for a case-specific and contextual discernment and judgment. The data on post placement suggests that there is a real transition to a more care based approach. This study suggests that the clinical placement serves as an indirect tool in enabling the nurses in psychiatric care to address the various challenges, especially the ethical ones, arising from such contexts by effecting a conceptual transition from a parochial principlist approach to a more holistic care approach.