Depending on how long you have for the assignment, the term "sterile conscience" is applied to the individual staff member's desire to protect the patient from harm by making sure that things are always sterile.
You can read about this, I believe, in the Berry & Kohn's OR nursing text; I'm not sure whether Alexander's ("Care of the Patient in Surgery") mentions this term.
To the non OR person, this concept may sound like a no-brainer. However, there are often times in which it is very unpleasant to deal with the consequences of the rules of sterility--lots of work, re-gowning people who've brushed up against stuff, completely having to tear down a sterile setup and re-sterilize instruments because of a torn back table cover or wrap or an unchanged chemical sterility indicator in a tray, etc. If people don't have this sense of "sterile conscience" they could look the other way and let things go unchanged, not sterile, and result in patient harm.
Another ethical concept of relevance in the OR setting is the phenomenon of "horizontal violence" among nurses. There's an AORN article on this in, I believe November of 2003 or 2004...there has been much publicized about the phenomenon within nursing at large. It is the concept of nurses "eating their young" or really acting unprofessionally, backstabbing and acting unduly mean/harsh toward one another. This is often a problem in OR settings, and the AORN article lists possible reasons.
Otherwise, the general ethical principles of nursing apply very fully--beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, etc.
Hope this isn't too late to be helpful!
Last edited by JLynnOR : Jun 30, 2007 at 10:22 AM.
Reason: Making added comment
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