If you need help writing your nursing essay, our professional nursing essay writing service is here to help! Longstaff emphasizes that ethics is fundamentally a practical concern.7 It`s about making decisions and taking (or not taking) action. Johnstone proposes the idea of the “task of ethics,” which, according to her, is to “find a way to motivate moral behavior, resolve disagreements and controversies between people, and generally bind people together in a peaceful community.”8 Undergraduate programs and some specialized graduate programs now include the study of ethics in their curricula. This gives nurses the opportunity to: Refine and practice these skills beyond the immediacy of the clinical setting. In addition to legal considerations, there are also ethical guidelines for care. Nurses should be aware of their profession`s code of ethics and know and recognize their integrity and morals. Nurses should have a clear, basic understanding of key ethical principles. The nursing profession must remain faithful to patient care while defending the right of patients to self-identify their needs and cultural norms. Although ethical considerations in nursing are difficult, they represent a true integration of the art of patient care. iv Nursing and Midwifery Council (2010) Standards for Pre-Registration of Nursing Education. Nursing and Midwifery Council, London, p.
17. For this reason, it is useful to distinguish ethics from a number of other topics with which it is often confused. This allows nurses to examine other value systems and ideas they might bring to ethical decision-making and to identify them explicitly. When differentiating ethics, it must also be recognized that all these factors are likely to be involved in and influence ethical decision-making. Although the famous bioethicist Peter Singer10 was probably one of the first to adopt this differentiation approach, a number of other authors on health law and ethics have recently adopted it.11 These other topics are listed below, and then an example is used to examine each problem. Do you have a degree of 2:1 or higher in nursing or health care? Making decisions about any of these ethical dilemmas is complex. Usually, there are no easy answers; Otherwise, there would be no dilemma. However, it is possible to make ethical decisions by developing and refining these decision-making processes and being aware of the motives and values with which they are undertaken. Justice Michael Kirby noted that “good law and ethics must be based on good data.”3 When analyzing ethical dilemmas, the legal parameters of the situation are inevitably important aspects of data, but they are unlikely to be the only considerations. It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a solid basis for ethical decisions or reasoning, but the chapter will lay out some basic ideas about ethics and provide a number of sources, some practices, some more theoretical, to allow the reader to explore the issues in more depth. To begin, the following section will attempt to define ethics and distinguish it from other concepts with which it is often confused. xxviii Lachman, V.
(2006). Applied ethics in nursing. New York: Springer, p. 102. Ethical values are essential for all health professionals. Ethical practice is a foundation for nurses who deal with ethical issues on a daily basis. Ethical dilemmas arise when nurses care for patients. These dilemmas can sometimes conflict with the nurse`s code of ethics or ethical values. Nurses advocate for patients and must balance patient care.
There are four main ethical principles: autonomy, charity, justice and non-malevolence. Autonomy and therefore consent can be “effective” both legally and ethically depending on the context and situation of the patient. From a health care perspective, autonomy may or may not be practical to exclude liability from litigation and avoid ethical criticism that is weighed against the patient`s best interests.xxxv It may also be that the patient does not have the necessary decision-making capacity, in which case caregivers may treat the patient without consent. This is generally based on the principle of necessity, and the circumstances in which it is permitted are limited.xxxvi It must be shown that it is necessary to treat the patient and, moreover, the need to act was associated with the practical impossibility of communicating with the patient, and the action taken was that which a reasonable person would take in the same circumstances, whether it acted in the best interests of the patient. xxxvii In addition, if the caregiver acts out of necessity, he must prove that he did not do more than was immediately necessary and in the best interest of the patient.xxxviii The question of what is immediately necessary, what is not taken further action and which violates the patient`s autonomy is not regulated by law and remains an ethical dilemma in nursing practice. Legal and ethical issues are prevalent in health care, especially in nursing practice where caregivers have one-on-one contact with patients on a daily basis. Ethical issues range from organ donation to genetic engineering, assisted suicide, denial of treatment in end-of-life care or simple procedures requiring consent. Many nurses have no formal training in legal and ethical issues and are therefore often not qualified to answer these questions when they arise in the medical setting.xxxix While there are legal, ethical, and professional guidelines that dictate the behavior of professionals, this requires on-the-job training and the ability to be aware of the risks of making a personal decision about a patient.
Nurses need to be guided in learning ethics in their profession to ensure mistakes do not occur. Because nurses have daily contact with patients in dynamic environments, ethical issues vary depending on patient profiles, developments in medical technology, and healthcare specialties. Awareness of ethical issues involves rational reflection on the actions to be taken in certain scenarios and adherence to the principles that guide this behavior. Nurses are influenced by professional, personal, cultural, social and political factors. The core responsibility of all physicians remains constant to promote health, act in the best interests of the patient, prevent disease, eliminate suffering, and extend services beyond the individual to their families and communities. Nursing practice adheres to its own code of ethics, which is governed by strict disciplinary guidelines, with the governing body having more influence over its members in medical matters than legislative bodies. The Ministry of Health issued Health Services Circular 219.99 which required certain requirements for a new nursing education program. The Nurses and Midwives Ordinance 2001 requires the Council of Nurses and Midwives (NMC) to establish minimum standards and requirements for professional and ethical nursing education.iv The NMC is an organisation created by Parliament to protect the public and regulates nursing medical and professional standards through the Register of Physicians (RMP). The purpose of the registry is to allow the GMC to monitor entry to the profession only by meeting the standards required to obtain an RMP and also monitoring the “fitness to practice” procedure to ensure that all practitioners maintain high and consistent standards of behaviour. The NMC provides guidance regarding expectations with respect to certain obligations such as confidentiality, medical research obligations, consent rights and autonomy.