Nursing Vaccination: A Case Study

There are several approaches a nurse should take when educating the public about the importance of vaccinations, but before that, the nurses themselves should understand why they are so important. Vaccination schedules and public compliance are the cornerstones in protecting the world’s population from disease. These principles promote what is known as “herd” or “community” immunity. This is the idea that “when a critical portion of a community is immunized against a contagious disease, most members of the community are protected against that disease because there is little opportunity for an outbreak”. (N.I.H., 2010) This protection also expands to individuals or groups that are ineligible to receive vaccines for medical reasons. Nursing Implication 1: Patient’s Rights. Provision 1.4 of the American Nurses Association’s (ANA) Code of Ethics is listed as the patient’s “right to self-determination”. This section establishes the nurse’s requirement to have “respect for human dignity [through] the recognition of specific patient rights, in particular, the right to self-determination”. It states that the “patient’s have a moral and legal right to determine what will be done with and to their own person...including the

Both the ICN and ANA task nurses with assisting and advocating for a client based on the moral values and ethics of the client. With this in mind, it is also important to consider the morals and ethical principles of the nurses involved in patient care. It is the nurse’s obligation to provide an ethical standard of care regardless of her own personal beliefs in all situations. The ANA Code of Ethics recognizes that there is the possibility of conflict in all nursing activities, and recommends that it is the nurse’s responsibility to recognize and identify conflicting beliefs and address them professionally while continuously promoting the patient’s safety and autonomy. (Butts & Rich, 2016,