Essay On Ethical Issues In Nursing

The study of ethics, moral conduct and decision making regarding ethical issues in nursing is a vital component of nursing education. Nurses may be confronted almost on a daily basis with the need to make nursing decisions when there is no right or wrong answer. Nurses will at times feel caught in the middle (Pavlish et. al, 2011). This dilemma demonstrates how easily ones nursing practice can be significantly altered. This dilemma also exemplifies how one complex dilemma in patient care, can impact on legal, ethical and professional issues for nurses. These issues interface with each other in substantial ways. Nurses must be prepared for these inevitable challenging situations (Tang, 2011).

You did a great job. You are acting as an advocate for the patient for their interest. We must support the rights of patients who are unable to advocate for themselves .We are facing lot of ethical problems in our workplace. Nurses must take a decision in Ethical dilemmas. These decisions affected by so many factors, including principles learned in school and nurses personal beliefs, and values. It is important that all healthcare professionals value and support their peers who have the courage to stand up and speak out against unethical behavior even when others are silent or differ in opinion. Ethical dilemmas in practice arise when one feels drawn both to do and not to do the same thing.

Amidst a whirlwind of change, nurses continue their roles as competent, honorable professionals. A relatively new issue, cultural integrity, correlates with the Code regarding “treatment of the human response.” The American Nurses Association’s “Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements”, also called the Code, highlights nurses’ consensus on professional principles. Nursing ethics guide how practitioners treat their patients and peers. Sensitivity to individual societal, familial and cultural background plays an important role in organizational integrity. By observing the following six practices, nursing professionals make life choices that promote individual and societal wellbeing.

In this case study the primary nurse, Amelia Wilkerson, is caring for a patient, Katy Palmer who has recently been admitted to the hospital for fatigue and abnormal lab counts. The patient asks Amelia for information regarding her diagnosis. Amelia has seen Katy’s results and knows that she has been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. The ethical dilemma seen in this situation is that it is outside of the scope of practice for Amelia to discuss Katy’s original diagnosis with her. This is reserved for the doctor alone. However, as a nurse that has developed a relationship with her patient it would be very difficult to not answer her question honestly. In addition, the patient might feel more comforted hearing the diagnosis from her nurse rather than the doctor as the nurse has been caring for her and they have developed a therapeutic relationship.

One ethical obligation nurses are required to fulfil during their shift is to ensure no harm is done to their patient. Due to nursing shortages and too many patient’s, nurses are finding this hard to do. Ethics help nurses make the right decisions with the guidance of their morals, but due to shortages and overworked nurses they tend to feel dissatisfied with their jobs. This results from unsafe work environments, lack of time for communication and quality care of patients. “Understaffing and overtime hours have been associated with increases in patient mortality, hospital-acquired infections, shock, and bloodstream infections” (Kane et al., 2007b). Ethical conflicts are work can lead to physical and mental burnout for nurses. According to the Nurse Code of Ethics nurses are morally obligated to

The tem ethics refers to the moral principles that guide a person’s behavior, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of their actions. In the field of nursing, these moral principles govern the relationship between the nurse and the patient, members of the healthcare team, and society at large. Nurses must constantly question whether a certain procedure or course of treatment is in the best interest of the patient. When viewing the film “Miss Evers’ Boys”, it was clear that the doctors, researchers, and even Miss Evers were not acting in the best interest of all the patients. This movie depicted true events of a study that took place in Macon County, Alabama, in 1932. This study was referred to as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis

Ethics guide nurses in making better decisions when providing care for patients. It is vital for nurses to follow the code of ethics while implementing daily nursing care. According to Catalano, ethics are “declarations of what is right or wrong and of what ought to be” (Catalano, 2009). Ethics guide human behaviors and help protect basic human rights. The American Nurses Association (ANA) Code of ethics governs nursing decisions in every day clinical practice. Registered nurses (RNs) have the ethical obligation to incorporate the ANA Code of Ethics in daily decisions concerning patient care. Some of the principle of ethics includes nonmaleficence, beneficence, and autonomy (Catalano, 2009). I stand to prove that Registered nurses should not allow patient death by honoring wishes for providing euthanasia measures.

Ethical dilemmas, also known as a moral dilemma, is a situation in which there is a choice between two options, neither of which resolves the situation completely. In other words, both options will result in negative results based on society and/or personal guidelines. Labor and delivery nurses are often confronted with ethical dilemmas in practice. To help student nurses prepare for this eventuality, nursing programs do their best to incorporate education about ethics and professionalism into courses. This introduction to ethics in nursing school also assists future nurses to begin recognizing and managing their own personal values in a way that can help guide them in resolving ethical conflicts they will encounter throughout their professional careers.

As a registered nurse, we face ethical issues every day. Some days we understand the clear cut ethical issue at hand; however, other ethical issues can be disguised. In my year and half of being an RN I have come across many ethical issues. As mentioned before, some are clear cut and others are hard to tread through. Initially, these ethical issues can make you question your job; however, after some reflection I believe these issues make us stronger nurses.

Provision one, a provision in the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses, entails that nurses should pursue their nursing career with empathy and respect towards all patients. In other words, patients should be viewed as separate individuals with separate values and beliefs. Nurses and other healthcare professionals should respect their individual decisions, whether they agree with them or not. This code of ethics provision relates to the ethical dilemma of a patient refusing medical treatment. Although nurses are trained to do all that they are capable of doing to save patients’ lives, sometimes nurses reach a dilemma that puts a strain on their practice. At times, patients’ refuse medical treatment, even if the treatment will

I tried to justify my interprofessional capability level by using the self-assessment tool of Interprofessional capability, including four domains: Collaborative Working, Reflection, Cultural Awareness & Ethical Practice and Organisational Competence. I have scored myself high on organisational competence. But I achieved lower scores on the other aspects due to lack of practice experiences. Related to my previous nursing practice as an adult student nurse in the hospital I have enhanced my interprofessional capability through practice combined with the theory of interprofessional studies. Now I explore more on collaborative working, reflection and cultural awareness and ethical practice throughout my previous relevant experience of nursing

I know that in my 25+ years of nursing there have been many issues that have involved one issue or another involving ethics of some sort, but probably the freshest in my mind has to be the one presented a few weeks ago. We had a patient on my unit (step-down) that came in nearly unresponsive from home that was a 78 year old male. Family states "they found him like this. He did have multiple health issues such as chronic renal failure on hemodialysis three times a week that he had missed for a week, congestive heart failure, atrial fib (controlled), diabetes, history of CVA x2, c-diff on admission that the family states that he had off and on a few months, so mostly a very sick patient to say the least. He was worked up from head to toe and showed no signs of another CVA, his A1C was good, BNP for his CHF was really not too bad.

What does nursing mean to me? Nursing means helping people heal, meeting their needs while they are in your care, listening to concerns, protecting them from harm, and educating them how to care for themselves while treating them with dignity, compassion and respect and giving of yourself to the care of people and community. It is having compassion for people and their health and being a humanitarian, making sure they receive the best care possible. Nurses must also treat families of patients with kindness, realizing they are going through a stressful situation also.

Ethics can be explained as principles a society develops to guide decisions about what is right and wrong. Ethical principles that society has are influenced by religion, history, and experience of the people in the group. Meaning that ethics is based on guidelines we have learned while growing up, that helps us differentiates what is right and what is wrong. For example, some people think health care should be a human right as others think it should only be available to those who can pay for it. Each group of people is guided by the principles they believe in. Ethics in health care play a vital role every day. The practice of health care includes many scenarios that have to do with making adequate decisions when it comes to patient’s life. For the purpose of this paper, I want to explain the occurrence and some of the ethical concerns found in a case of an elderly patient, who believed in Curanderos and didn’t realize the harm she was doing in regards to her health by not taking her medications.

This assignment is a reflection of ethical dilemmas in nursing practice as a registered nurse; this paper is based on the group assignment which was completed for NURS3004. This reflection will include an explanation of the role that I portrayed in the group, the preparation that I did for the role, what could have been done differently, how this group assignment has impacted me in terms of working in a team and finally explain how this assignment will assist me in my future clinical practice as a newly registered nurse.