Ethical Dilemmas, Coping Mechanisms and Professional Autonomy

Physicians and nurses encountered different types of ethical dilemmas while deployed and dealt with them in different manners. Identity played a large role in balancing the obligations and aspirations of either or both the medical and military profession and affected how medical personnel perceived their own role, made sense of situations, and eventually made decisions and acted upon those decisions. Medical personnel were able to deal with many dilemmas from a medical perspective, as long as military necessities did not interfere. Although experiencing conflicting emotions, they were therefore not troubled by them. Ethical dilemmas related to opposing priorities and dual-loyalty were more complex to handle. These caused internal and external friction. This research identified three patterns of coping in which either a medical, military, or hybrid professional identity are salient in role-perception and the different phases of decision-making. Beyond being coping patterns, this research discovered that these represent three different ways in which medical personnel experienced agency and professional autonomy and the ability to work conscientiously while deployed with the armed forces: either as medical, hybrid, or military professionals.