Abstract
Youth health centers have, during the last decades, became increasingly significant in municipal preventive health care and health promotion. Community health nurses play a key role in this challenge in high-school health services, and especially with regards to counselling youth on issues ranging from lifestyle, sexuality and mental health to concrete physical health advice. The purpose of the enclosed study is to increase our knowledge of the everyday challenges community health nurses encounter in their work with high-school students. The study is conducted from a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective with in-depth interviews of 6 community health nurses. Main findings suggest that community health nurses often experience difficult ethical challenges. This conflicting “middle position” becomes evident in relational situations, moral challenges, towards rules and regulations, emotional and professional challenges as well as cooperation with other regulatory systems.