By: Arthur Hall
Submitted: 2010-06-10 07:14:05 | Word Count: 783
Ethics has been defined as a person’s judgment of what is right or wrong. This kind of judgment is never comprehensive because it is always crowded with prejudice and misinformation about the issue at hand. It may therefore be important that the nurses involve a lot of critical thinking in making all the decision concerning their daily interactions with the patients. The nurse should be able to ask herself if she has enough information concerning the patient, if the assumptions she has made are correct and if there is some important information she has omitted in making the assumption and if it is possible that she can handle the patient’s situation in an alternative way (Chitty and Black, 2005, p. 387).
Good nursing is not all about the knowledge that the nurses have acquired over the years but it also entails a lot of ethical issues that, if not considered, may put the nurse’s capability in question. Due to the advancement in communication and logistics services, the barriers between the patients and the care providers have been reduced. This has presented the nurses with new ethical challenges and therefore obliging them to heed to these new changes. The ethical principals that govern the nurse’s activities include nonmaleficence, beneficence, autonomy, justice, confidentiality, paternalism, fidelity and veracity.
The principle of nonmaleficence means that the patient should not be harmed. This principle gives the patient a right of protection by the care provider. The nurse’s role in this case is therefore to protect the patient from any form of harm. The nurse can harm the patient by refusing to answer to his or her call which may cause a lot of emotional distress to the patient. The nurse may also harm the patient by damaging the equipments that are meant for the patient. Since such harm may either be deliberate or accidental, it is important therefore that care is taken to prevent such harms by ensuring the reliability of the communication system and also providing replacements for the damaged equipments. The treatment given should also be safe for the patient and the ethical questions that should be addressed in this case is if the medication administered will be safe for the patient and if the new models for practicing nursing are harmful or beneficial to the patient (Ludwick and Silva 1999).
Beneficence is coined from the word beneficial and it means that the care provider should be kind and of benefit to the patient. At times, there is a conflict on what is more important than the other and what should be given preference over the other. The principle of beneficence raises issues between the patient and the nurse or the patient and the health care organization. It is always a common agreement that the needs of the patient are more important than those of the organizations; this is never the case in most of the scenarios since most of the nurses tend to ignore the autonomy of the patients when it comes to health care decisions. The ethical issue here is that, is it right to have the nurses ignore the patients independence in having their preferences of health services (Ludwick and Silva, 1999)?
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The patients are normally unable to provide themselves with health care services and therefore depend on the care providers for assistance. The care providers should be able to practice paternalism in handling these helpless patients. Paternalism in this case refers to treating the patients in a fatherly or kind manner without asking for any compensation in return. Paternalism therefore requires that the care providers should be able to make the decisions for the patients, where these patients are suffering from conditions that prevent them from making their own decisions, for instance, those suffering from memory loss. Whether it is ethically right to have the nurses make decisions for their patients is an issue that needs some insight (Ludwick and Silva 1999).
Autonomy or independence implies that the individuals have the right to make his/her own decisions. The ethical issue in this case is if it is right to have the nurse make the decisions for his or her patients. The other issue is if the nurses who are in the states where they are allowed autonomy in their decisions will feel offended when the autonomy is taken away or if those in states where they are allowed limited autonomy will be able to make ethically right decisions when their autonomy is increased. This principle also brings the question as to whether the nurses who have been allowed independence by the society would be able to reciprocate this by providing quality services to the community (Ludwick, Silva 1999).
