Nursing Ethical Dilemmas

According to (Hurst et al., 2007), a challenge in the application of ethics for doctors, in the clinical setting is making a decision for the patients. Decisions making is a complex process for a doctor because different cultural have a different health status, disease and rate of death. Moreover, how people consume the medicine also consequently effect to decisions making because they do not have enough knowledge in medicine. Besides, they have to refer the hospital rules and work more hours in a week to handle the patient. All this can cause burden among doctor, thus effect their quality of care. Different cultural environment and health care system also is ones of the reason why doctors had an ethical conflict during making decisions.

Doctors should protect the patient confidentiality of patient information as much as possible. Patients should explain about how their personal health information will be use. Lastly, a government should create the laws for maintaining the confidentiality of patients on routine medical and research practice (William, 2005). The next paragraph discusses more about the challenge in nursing group.

One of the ethical challenges in the nursing profession is nurses’ ethical decision-making in the cases of physical restraint of patient. Results indicate that in many cases, decision-making by nurses is not a team process. Nurses either blindly follow an opinion or request of other persons involved or adopt an earlier decision without questioning the different options and related values (Casterle, Goethals & Gastmans, 2015).

For examples, according to Casterle, Goethals & Gastmans (2015) find that the nurses’ reasoning process regarding physical restraint is strongly influenced by the time of day, the availability of other staff, equipment and alternatives, and the work pressure experienced by the nurses. It is a notable finding that when nurses are under pressure of time, their decision-making gives priority to the safety of the

The challenges face by this group is ‘lone’ clinical ethicists. This happens when relying upon only a single bioethicist to provide ethics services. The lone clinical bioethicist faces a number of challenges related to specialization, workload and peer support. Clinical ethicists have the generalist and specialist competencies to be valuable resources to their organization, they cannot alone to provide all the clinical bioethics services, education and research required. (MacRae, Chidwick, Berry,Secker, Hebert, Shaul,Faith & Singer,