The ICS has demonstrated promise as a tool for measuring patients' evaluations of their hospital experience and individuality in care.

Moral injury emerged in the healthcare discussion quite recently because of the difficulties and challenges healthcare workers and healthcare systems face in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moral injury involves a deep emotional wound and is unique to those who bear witness to intense human suffering and cruelty. This article aims to synthesise the very limited evidence from empirical studies on moral injury and to discuss a better understanding of the concept of moral injury, its importance in the healthcare context and its relation to the well-known concept of moral distress. A scoping literature review design was used to support the discussion. Systematic literature searches conducted in April 2020 in two electronic databases, PubMed/Medline and PsychInfo, produced 2044 hits but only a handful of empirical papers, from which seven well-focused articles were identified. The concept of moral injury was considered under other concepts as well such as stress of conscience, regrets for ethical situation, moral distress and ethical suffering, guilt without fault, and existential suffering with inflicting pain. Nurses had witnessed these difficult ethical situations when faced with unnecessary patient suffering and a feeling of not doing enough. Some cases of moral distress may turn into moral residue and end in moral injury with time, and in certain circumstances and contexts. The association between these concepts needs further investigation and confirmation through empirical studies; in particular, where to draw the line as to when moral distress turns into moral injury, leading to severe consequences. Given the very limited research on moral injury, discussion of moral injury in the context of the duty to care, for example, in this pandemic settings and similar situations warrants some consideration.

Objectives:To explore reasons for institutionalization of people with dementia according to informal caregivers as well as variation in reasons between countries.Design: An explorative cross-sectional study was conducted in eight European countries. Setting:Per country a minimum of three long-term care facilities, offering care and accommodation as a package, participated in this study. Participating countries were selected to represent different geographic areas in Europe. Participants:Of the 791 informal caregivers involved in the RightTimePlaceCare project of people with dementia who were recently admitted to a long-term care facility, 786 were included for this study. Measurements:As part of a semi-structured interview, informal caregivers were asked the main reason for institutionalization in an open-ended question. Answers were categorized according to a conventional coding approach. All reasons were then quantified and tested. Results:Mainly patient related reasons were stated, such as neuropsychiatric symptoms (25%), care dependency (24%) and cognition (19%). Neuropsychiatric symptoms were among the most often mentioned reasons in the majority of countries. Beside patient related reasons, caregiver burden and the inability of the informal caregiver to care for the patient were stated as reasons (both 15%). Further analyses showed countries differ significantly in reasons according to informal caregivers. Additionally, reasons were analysed for spouses and child-caregivers, showing that spouses more often stated reasons related to themselves compared to child-caregivers. Conclusion:Multiple reasons contribute to the institutionalization for people with dementia, with several factors that may influence why there were country differences. Variation in the organization of dementia care and cultural aspects, or the relationship between the informal caregiver and person with dementia may be factors influencing the reasons. Because of a wide variation in reasons between countries, no one-size-fits-all approach can be offered to guide informal caregivers when facing the possibility of institutionalization of the person with dementia.

This paper describes a preliminary study in which an instrument was developed for the measurement of individual care in adult patients and in which the reliability and validity of the instrument were evaluated. Individual care was defined in terms of how patient individuality was taken into account and how patient participation in decision-making was facilitated. The purpose here is to describe the process by which the individual care instrument (IC) was developed, the preliminary testing of the instrument and psychometric evaluation of the instrument in a sample of adult patients discharged from a Finnish general Hospital (n=203). Item analyses showed an acceptable level of internal consistency reliability and homogeneity in each scale of the IC, and Cronbach alpha values were high in every measurement. Exploratory factor analysis supported a three-factor solution. The psychometric evaluations suggested that the instrument is worthy of further development.

Transition into ILTC seems to increase total costs of dementia care from a societal perspective. The prevention of long-term care placement might be cost reducing for European health systems. However, this conclusion depends on the country, on the valuation method for informal caregiving and on the degree of impairment.