Every nurse, regardless of the area of practice, makes decisions during their daily responsibilities that need nursing ethical considerations. In a career like nursing, endorsing standards of ethics is particularly essential because of the medical care level, compassion, and risky situations that nurses deal with. However, as all nurses will say, decisions can weigh heavily on a person’s shoulders. An essential set of nursing ethical considerations provides a firm foundation that nurses can depend on to assist them in making informed decisions.
This article is an in-depth summary of nursing ethical considerations and their nursing implications. Our nursing assignment help will be your academic associate in the journey to becoming a nurse.
Nursing ethics definition
The nursing ethics code establishes nursing ethical considerations. Much more significant than just paper words, the code will be North Star nursing. It governs a nurse’s behavior during helpful times when a patient places their care, their trust, and at times even death and life decisions on their shoulders.
Established by the (ANA), American Nurses Association, the Nursing Ethics Code “informs all nurse’s life aspects.” The American Nurses Association’s Nursing Ethics Code is the non-negotiable profession’s standard.
It’s also a vital document that has dealt with social and technological changes in healthcare over time.
What Are The 7 Ethical Considerations In Nursing?
The seven nursing ethical considerations for your paper writing include the following;
1. Autonomy
The autonomy ethical principle recognizes all individual decision-making and self-determination rights depending on their preferences, values, and beliefs. The ANA describes autonomy as “determining the actions of an individual by independent choice capacity, including competence demonstration.” The critical ethical obligation of a nurse is patient autonomy. Depending on independence, patients can refuse medical treatment and nursing care.
2. Beneficence
It’s described by the American Nurses Association as “the benefiting others bioethical principle by preventing harm, avoiding harmful conditions, or acting affirmatively to benefit people, often exceeding what the law requires.” When looking after mental well-being disorders patients, a nurse implements beneficence when campaigning for mental health client evidence-based treatment.
3. No maleficence
The American Nurses Association describes it as “the principle of bioethics that specifies no harm duty and balances preventable harm with good achieved benefits.” A classic example of a nursing practice not harming is expressed by a nurse checking the rights to medication thrice before delivering medications. In this manner, medication errors will be prevented, and the duty of not harm will be fulfilled. An excellent example of a nurse implementing mental well-being care with no maleficence is ensuring that psychotropic medication’s adverse effects (such as tardive dyskinesia or lithium toxicity) do not harm patients.
4. Justice
The American Nurses Association describes it as “the moral obligation of acting based on equity and equality and the standard connected to everyone’s fairness in society.” The justice principle requires nurses to provide care equitably and fairly. A nurse provides exemplary care for everyone with a similar fairness level despite their characteristics or personalities, such as sexual orientation, financial status, gender, cultural beliefs, or religion. A nurse has a societal contract to “offer compassionate care to address health optimization, protection, empowerment, advocacy, injury and illness prevention, suffering alleviation, well-being, and comfort individual’s needs.”
5. Fidelity
Fidelity’s role is described as the responsibility to provide competent health care. A nursing role fidelity example is remaining updated with EBP and implementing efficient mental well-being interventions.
6. Veracity
It means to tell the truth. Informed consent is an example of healthcare veracity. A nurse ensures patients have psychotropic medication or prescribed procedure risks and benefits good understanding.
7. Caring Role
A nurse uses a care-based, client-centered, nursing care ethical approach that concentrates on the situation’s specific circumstances. This approach corresponds with the essential caring and holistic nursing concepts in a nurse-patient relationship, which are well-grounded in compassion, dignity, kindness, and respect.
What Are The 6 Ethical Considerations?
The six ethical considerations include;
1. Voluntary participation
It means that every research subject is free to engage without coercion or pressure.
Every participant can leave or withdraw from a study at all points without having a duty to continue. The participants do not need to give the reason for the study.
It is vital to make the participants understand that no negative repercussions or consequences exist for their participation refusal. After all, they are taking the time to assist you in your research, so you must respect their respective decisions without attempting to make them think otherwise.
2. Informed consent
It refers to the circumstance in which every potential participant understands and receives all the needed information to decide if they need to participate. The required data includes the study’s institutional approval, benefits, funding, and risks.
Usually, you will give the participants a reading text and ask them if they’ve any queries. If they have agreed to participate, they can initial or sign a consent form. Note that this might not be informed consent’s adequacy when dealing with specifically vulnerable people groups.
If you are collecting information from low literacy people, ensure you verbally expound your consent form to them before they agree to participate.
3. Anonymity
It implies that you do not know who your participants are since you cannot link all of them to their personal data.
Anonymity is only guaranteed by not gathering personal identification information—for instance, videos, names, photos, phone numbers, physical characteristics, email addresses, and IP addresses.
4. Confidentiality
It implies that you recognize your participants but omit all the report’s identification information.
Every participant has a privacy right, so you must protect their private data as much as you use or store it. Even though you cannot anonymously collect data, you must obtain confidentiality whenever possible.
5. Harm Potential
Researchers must consider every possible source of harm to participants. There are different forms of harm.
- Psychological harm: Delicate tasks or questions might cause negative emotions like anxiety or shame.
- Social harm: Involvement can involve stigma, social risks, or public embarrassment.
- Physical harm: Injury or pain can be caused by the procedures of study.
- Legal harm: sensitive data Reporting could cause a privacy breach or legal risks.
It is preferable to consider all possible harm sources in the study and concrete ways of mitigating them. Involve the instructor to discuss harm reduction steps.
Ensure to disclose every possible harm risk to all participants before your study to obtain informed consent. In case there exists a harm risk, prepare to give participants medical services, counseling, or resources if required.
6. Results communication
Your way of communicating the results of research can sometimes include ethical issues. Excellent science communication involves honesty, reliability, and credibility. It is best to produce as transparent results as possible.
Follow steps to avoid research misconduct and plagiarism whenever possible diligently.
- Plagiarism
It means submitting another person’s work as yours. Although it might not be intentional, copying a person’s work without good credit adds up to stealing. It is an ethical problem for research communication because you might benefit from harming fellow researchers.
- Research misconduct
It means falsifying or making up data, manipulating analyses of data, or misrepresenting research report results. It is an academic fraud form.
What Are The 5 Ethical Considerations In Nursing Research?
The five nursing ethical considerations in research are;
1. Informed Consent
It can, at times, end up becoming an ethical conflict for caregivers. A nursing ethical dilemma might occur when a concern exists that a patient and their loved ones don’t understand a patient’s treatments or haven’t been informed. There exists a concern since sometimes patients don’t feel comfortable giving consent and asking questions without fully realizing their treatment implications.
If a patient trusts their nurses and doctors and feel supported, they will most likely experience excellent outcomes and follow the treatment plan. To prevent ethical dilemmas, a nurse should make sure that a patient fully understands all their medication plan facets.
2. Protecting Confidentiality and Patient Privacy
Confidentiality and patient privacy are critical ethical issues nurses face. If not correctly done, this can result in legal ramifications that cause healthcare professionals severe consequences. With the medical information of patients safeguarded by the (HIPA) Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, there exist definite guidelines and boundaries for protecting the privacy of patients.
Although nurses should protect the rights of their patients and act to benefit themselves, they still should respect the autonomy of their patients. With client autonomy, a patient has the privilege to refuse procedures, medications, or treatments.
3. Shared Clinical Decision-Making
It expands client autonomy where healthcare providers and patients collaborate to make informed patient care decisions. With the shared making of decisions, healthcare providers and patients have a patient’s culture, background, beliefs, and values open conversations that build a trusting doctor-patient relationship.
4. Advanced Care Planning (ACP) Address
ACP is an ever-challenging conversation healthcare providers have, predominately in the surrounding conversations of end-of-life care. These conversations occur between doctors and patients when they have to plan for their health care in the future if they are left critically ill to make informed decisions or pass away. Patients will document, explore, and discuss their healthcare personal preferences. This process assists them in recognizing their future medical care personal values and goals.
5. Inadequate staffing and resources
Although this might not be ethical for personal nurses, nurse managers and healthcare executives must understand that patient care, inadequate staffing, and resources are lacking. As healthcare expenses continue to increase, a nurse manager is at odds with patient needs and budgeting constraints. When a medical facility has limited resources, the patients will be at risk of receiving improper care—forcing a nurse to make challenging decisions while providing care.
Hard decisions might also need to be made when facilities face inadequate levels of staffing. When there isn’t enough patient staff, nurses can’t attend to all the needs of each patient.
Conclusion
Whether you are looking for your first job in nursing or are a seasoned professional, ethical principles can help you better serve your patients. This article on nursing ethical considerations will educate you more on the basic nursing ethics that you must adhere to in your call of duty.
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