Effectiveness of CURA: Healthcare professionals' moral resilience and moral competences.

Clinical ethics support instruments aim to support healthcare professionals in dealing with moral challenges in clinical practice. CURA is a relatively new instrument tailored to the wishes and needs of healthcare professionals in palliative care, especially nurses. It aims to foster their moral resilience and moral competences. To investigate the effects of using CURA on healthcare professionals regarding their Moral Resilience and Moral Competences. Single group pre-/post-test design with two questionnaires. Questionnaires used were the Rushton Moral Resilience Scale measuring Moral Resilience and the Euro-MCD, measuring Moral Competences. Respondents mainly consisted of nurses and nurse assistants who used CURA in daily practice. Forty-seven respondents contributed to both pre- and post-test with 18 months between both tests. Analysis was done using descriptive statistics and Wilcoxon signed rank tests. This study followed the SQUIRE checklist. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Amsterdam UMC. Informed consent was obtained from all respondents. The total Moral Resilience score and the scores of two subscales of the RMRS, that is, Responses to Moral Adversity and Relational Integrity, increased significantly. All subscales of the Euro-MCD increased significantly at posttest. Using CURA more often did not lead to significant higher scores on most (sub) scales. This study indicates that CURA can be used to foster moral resilience and moral competences of healthcare professionals. CURA therefore is a promising instrument to support healthcare professionals in dealing with moral challenges in everyday practice.