Ethical Issues In Health Care

675 Words2 Pages

To save or not to save? That is the question. In the hospital setting, many problems arise and it is the duty of the healthcare workers to ensure, aide, and facilitate the patient’s well being to the best of their ability. Though all problems cannot simply be solved with medicine and therapy, it takes a considerate amount of critical thinking as well. What should happen when a problem like making sure a patient stays alive, backfires and the patient actually wants to die? Also, for a person desiring death, it is not considered righteous and we, as humans will deem them as mentally ill. This is where the ethical and moral issues of promoting health and respecting the patient’s right to autonomy are conflicted. Upon certain circumstances, ethical …show more content…

In the nursing field, there are core values that need to be followed in order to make sure the nurses are always maintaining optimal care. These are to be caring, to show integrity, to respect diversity, and to demonstrate excellence. Two of the values, caring and integrity are in conflict with this ethical issue. A nurse’s obligation is always to make the patient feel better and help rid their sickness, but what happens when the patient doesn’t want to get better? This is where the conflict of integrity comes in, in that nurses should respect the patient’s autonomy, but also do what is right and make them better. And though the patient may wish to cause self-harm, a nurse should never aide in the harming of a patient. The nurse should always maintain a caring position and respect the patient’s well …show more content…

I actually cannot make up my mind on the issue. On one hand, I want to stay professional and abide by what the patient desires but on the other, my moral side says I should not because I, as a human would not want people to kill themselves and idly watch as they slowly die when I could have revived the patient. This is definitely an issue to be further discussed for future references because this will most likely be reintroduced in the hospital and knowing what to do in those couple of seconds can mean life or

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