The Importance Of Ethical And Patient Care Issues In Nursing

1. The study conducted a survey that identified what nurses identified as “most stressful ethical and patient care issues were protecting patients’ rights; autonomy and informed consent to treatment; staffing patterns; advanced care planning; and surrogate decision-making” (Ulrich, 2010). Other issues included “confidentiality or right to privacy; and end-of-life decision-making”, with novice nurses reporting more stress compared to a wise nurse (Ulrich, 2010). Every day you in the nurse role there is a possibility of an ethical dilemma coming up. Managers must be aware of the moral issues and ethical dilemmas so that they can advocate for the nursing staff. They need to ensure that the ethical principle are all followed: “autonomy, beneficence,

Using this tool can help “ethical decision making” by reflecting on different aspects like the consequences, rules, and goals (Yoder-Wise, 2015).

2. Moral distress “occurs when faced with situations in which two ethical principle compete”, like quality verses quantity of life (Yoder-Wise, 2015). “When the nurse is balancing the patient’s autonomy issues with attempting to do what the nurse knows is in the patient’s best interest” it can become a sticky situation for the nurse making a decision (Yoder-Wise, 2015). Moral distress can occur when there is understaffing, nursing application is contrary with religious beliefs, and when look at quality verses quantity of life. On my unit there has been an issue of understaffing for techs; this is due to there being thirty beds and a lack of funds to pay for the techs, hence there is only two or three per shift. It is very hard and demanding work, hence, people have quit with the increasing patient load. My manager was meeting with human resources this week about the issue. She would love to hire more but there

So the moral distress of safe and quality care for 15 patients is tough. Now the patients are not in danger because the RN/BSN nursing staff is sufficient; just causing the nurses to have a lot of overtime hours. On the unity the quality verses quantity of life has been discussed with stroke patients a lot since they are typically older, a lot in their 90s. Hence, when do they call palliative care and bring the topic up to the family of someone who was fully functioning yesterday; this has been a moral distress issue for nurses. The nurse know that palliative teams should come but the family does not want the word ‘hospice’ even used in their range of hearing. Then another example I thought of was the religious implications for nurses; different religions have things they do