Introduction Although there have been reports of misbehavior and disrespectful maternal care by healthcare providers worldwide, there are few intervention studies aimed at promoting respectful care, particularly among midwives. Research objectives The aim of this study was to examine the effect of Moral Case Deliberation (MCD) on the of midwives’ knowledge and practice in the field of respectful maternity care. Research design and methods This semi-experimental study involved 46 midwives working in the maternity departments of two hospitals affiliated with Bushehr (...) University of Medical Sciences in 2023. The two hospitals were randomly divided into control and intervention groups. All midwives from both hospitals were included in the study. The Dilemma Method of MCD was implemented for midwives of intervention hospital. The Midwives’ Knowledge and Practice of Respectful Maternity Care scale was used for data collection. It was administered both before and two weeks after the intervention. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 20). Ethical considerations The study was approved by ethics committee of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences in Bushehr, Iran (ethics code: IR.BPUMS.REC.1402.017). All participants provided written informed consent. Findings The intervention group showed a significantly greater increase in knowledge scores from pre-test to post-test compared to the control group ( p <.001). The intervention group had a significantly higher mean change score in practice self-assessment and practice peer evaluation, from pre-test to post-test, than in the control group ( p <.001). Discussion MCD based on the dilemma method can improve practice in the field of respect-oriented midwifery care by increasing knowledge and potentially changing attitudes. Conclusion The Dilemma Method of MCD improved midwives’ knowledge and practice regarding respectful maternity care. This method can be included in the midwifery care quality improvement program to promote respectful maternity care. It is necessary to develop methods for wider dissemination of MCD in the cultural context of Iran. (shrink)

In all research, ethical considerations are crucial to reliability and quality and researchers are guided by various national and international documents and ethical committees. Despite different strategies to guide researchers and to ensure quality, there still seems to be uncertainty in educational science about how research ethics should be positioned and handled in practice. The aim of this study is to phenomenologically explore what meanings the phenomenon research ethics are given in Swedish doctoral dissertations in educational research based on how (...) doctoral researchers position, frame and present research ethics in their ethical elaborations. The empirical data consists of 60 doctoral dissertations in educational science at Swedish universities from the past year. The result indicates very different meanings of ethical considerations despite a quite common point of departure in the Swedish Research Council’s guidelines and knowledge of the Ethics Review Act. Some variations can be related to the differences in the studies’ designs, but regardless of such explanations, the conclusion is that consensus regarding ethical considerations in research is largely lacking. (shrink)