Ethical Dilemma in Nursing Essay

Nursing is a profession that is concentrated on the ability of a person to improve their skill in applying their roles and responsibilities to provide care for the patient. This means that the nurse is always available to ensure that proper care has been applied to the patient using the ideal standards of nursing principles. As a nurse, you are responsible for the prognosis of the patient to track their health condition while seeking treatment to the hospital. This is an important consideration because every patient has the right to receive a proper medical attention and treatment to any health care institution. As a patient, they also have the right to live a longer life, which is why they seek medical treatment and rehabilitation to prolong their longevity.

Nursing is one of the most challenging professions in our society because practitioners need to follow the proper standards of care in either the hospital or community setting. This is because ethics play an important role in the professional practice of ever nurse in our community. Nurses often commit negligence, which is the most common offense applied in the hospital or in the community setting while providing treatment to patients. An example of this is a wrong medication, wrong patient, wrong route, and accidents during a treatment procedure due to lack of assessment. When nurse commits errors such as negligence, patients usually suffer another form of injury aside from their present condition of medical illness. As a result, the life of the patient is challenged because they have been compromised by the nurse that should have been the right person to provide treatment to relieve signs and symptoms of the disease or disability.

In nursing ethics, veracity is often applied because all patients should be treated with fairness while addressing their health concerns. There are nurses who failed to abide by the rules by failing to practice diversity towards the patients. Nurses are sometimes denying access to health care to patients because of their sexual orientation and race. Professional malpractice is also committed by nurses when they practice certain procedures towards the patient in order to improve their skill while compromising the health of the patients. As a result, the patient suffers from complications, especially when an accident happens during a procedure such as inserting a nasogastric tube. Patients trust all nurses when they are going to seek medical treatment at the hospital or during a community mission to provide health care services to a certain number of populations.

Patients usually file for criminal complaints against the nurse whenever they feel that they were neglected. This is especially for patients who sustained injuries when they sought medical treatment at the hospital. As a result, the license of nurses has been revoked because they were proven guilty after the hospital conducted a thorough investigation into the matter. Hospital institutions who were involved in an ethical malpractice when their health care workers were responsible for causing damage or injuries to the patients, the license to operate can be compromised. The worst-case scenario for nursing ethics is when the patient died from injuries because nurses were unable to provide the rightful care while they were on duty. Former nurses who have their licenses revoked have to find a way to continue their productivity by searching for new jobs that are not associated with their former nursing practice (Gastmans, 2013).

Reference

Gastmans, C. (2013). “Dignity-enhancing nursing care: A foundational ethical framework”. Nursing Ethics. SAGE Publications. 20 (2): 142–149.