Hwa Kim

Background Compassionate care is a core ethical obligation in nursing, yet the processes through which nurses enact and sustain it remain insufficiently theorized. Existing grounded theory models have not examined an East Asian care context in which nursing staff may assume both clinical and daily living care. Research question/aim/objectives How do clinical nurses experience, construct, and sustain compassionate care, and what ethical challenges shape this process? Research design A grounded theory design following Strauss and Corbin was employed. Semi-structured interviews were analysed using open, axial, and selective coding with constant comparison. Ethics of care and moral distress served as sensitizing concepts, while categories were generated inductively. Trustworthiness followed Lincoln and Guba’s criteria. Participants and research context Participants were thirteen female nurses from tertiary and secondary hospitals in South Korea, working across intensive care, hospice and palliative care, general and haematology wards, and emergency settings (mean clinical experience 14.9 years). Interviews were conducted from July 2020 to February 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ethical considerations Institutional Review Board approval was obtained, and all participants provided written informed consent. Findings/results The core category—comprehensive care grounded in an understanding of the illness trajectory—described compassionate nursing as a practice in which anticipating where a patient stands in the illness course shaped responses to present and emerging needs. Workload and time pressure constrained compassionate engagement, while collegial support helped nurses sustain it. Professional fulfilment and emotional depletion appeared as consequences that could influence subsequent care. Conclusions Compassionate care was shaped by the integration of clinical understanding, relational engagement, and organizational conditions. Sustaining this practice may require workload governance and structured collegial support rather than reliance on individual resilience alone.

This study investigated the usefulness of the six-item Stress and Anxiety to Viral Epidemics scale and the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale as tools to assess anxiety related to coronavirus disease in cancer patients. A total of 221 patients with cancer responded to an anonymous online questionnaire between 15 July and 15 August 2020. The functional impairment of the patients was assessed using the Work and Social Adjustment Scale, and the SAVE-6 and CAS were also applied. Among these 221 cancer patients, 110 had SAVE-6 scores ≥ 15 and 21 had CAS scores ≥ 5. Within the study population, 104 and 29 patients had WSAS scores ≥ 11 and ≥ 21, respectively. The correlations between the SAVE-6 and WSAS and CAS scores were statistically significant. The cut-off for the SAVE-6 was 15 points, while that for the WSAS was 11. Our results suggested that the SAVE-6 and CAS could be used to evaluate moderate and severe degrees of functional impairment related to mental health, respectively, in cancer patients during viral epidemics.

Should answers to fundamental questions of political philosophy be ‘convincing’ and ‘meaningful’ to real people with vested interests? Normative behaviourists argue that they should, and this can be achieved by avoiding the use of intuitions in our normative theorizing and instead relying on long-term empirical evidence of human behaviour. In this paper, I argue that to obtain the full benefits of behaviourism, it needs to be accompanied by some form of mentalism. Normative behaviourism sacrifices critical distance from the status quo to provide answers that are convincing and meaningful. However, there is no clear benefit obtained from this sacrifice. Furthermore, because of behaviourism’s institutional focus in its current form, it does not have much to say about how to achieve its goals. Behaviourists can solve both problems by incorporating a mentalist account of political agency, one that determines what values and ideals political agents should fight for and helps political agents develop strategies to achieve their goals.

Social media platforms play a central role in the structure of political discourse today. It is imperative to theorise about why and how we should regulate these institutions to manage some of the problems they raise for political discourse, namely misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and polarising content. In this paper, I scrutinise their business models to form a basis of justification and strategy to regulate social media platforms. I argue that, in virtue of their business models, platforms are morally complicit with malicious actors in quickly and widely spreading their disinformation, hate speech, and provocative claims. I do this by rejecting the claim that platforms are merely intermediaries that reflect their users popular preferences and therefore cannot be complicitous with malicious actors as they have no intentional participation. With this basis of justifying regulation, I propose a progressive tax on platforms advertising revenue based on the number of users they have and show how this is preferable to banning the business model. This can remove the main incentive social media platforms have to be complicit with malicious actors without further consolidating the ‘winner take all’ nature of the social media market.

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind.