Ethics - ✔️ the study of conduct and character. It is concerned
with determining what is good or valuable for individuals, groups, and
society at large.
Acts that are ethical reflect a commitment to standards that individuals,
professions, and societies strive to meet. When decisions must be made
about health care, understandable disagreement can occur among health
care providers, families, patients, friends, and people in the community.
The right thing to do can be hard to determine when ethics, values, and
perceptions about health care collide.
Autonomy - ✔️ Commitment to include patients in decisions;
refers to the commitment to include patients in decisions about all aspects
of care as a way of acknowledging and protecting a patient's independence.
Involving patients in decisions about their care is now standard practice.
Providers are obligated to inform patients about risks and benefits of
treatment plans and then to ensure that they understand and agree with
their plan.
Respect for provider autonomy refers to provider relationships to
institutions.
Beneficence - ✔️ Taking positive actions to help others;
fundamental to the practice of nursing and medicine. The agreement to act
with beneficence implies that the best interests of the patient remain more
important than self-interest.
Nonmaleficence - ✔️ Avoidance of harm or hurt; Maleficence
refers to harm or hurt; thus nonmaleficence is the avoidance of harm or
hurt. In health care, ethical practice involves not only the will to do good,
but an equal commitment to do no harm.
Justice - ✔️ Being fair; refers to fairness. It is used most often in
discussions about access to health care resources, including the just
distribution of resources. The term just culture refers to the promotion of
open discussion without fear of recrimination whenever mistakes,
especially those involving adverse events, occur or nearly occur.
,Fidelity - ✔️ Agreement to keep promises; also refers to the
unwillingness to abandon patients regardless of the circumstances, even
when personal beliefs differ as they may when dealing with drug dealers,
members of the gay community, women who received an abortion, or
prisoners.
Code of nursing ethics - ✔️ - A set of guiding principles that all
members of a profession accept
- Helps professional groups settle questions about practice or behavior
- Includes advocacy, responsibility, accountability, and confidentiality
Social networking - ✔️ presents ethical challenges for nurses; can
be a supportive source of information about patient care or professional
nursing activities. The risk to patient privacy is great. Posting a photo with
no identifiers should not be practiced, as sometimes, the patient can still be
identified. Becoming friends with patients may cloud your ability to remain
objective. Workplace policies will guide your decisions in engaging with
social media.
ANA code of ethics - ✔️ The American Nurses Association (ANA)
code of ethics provides a foundation for professional nursing.
A code of ethics can be defined as a collective statement about the group's
expectations and standards of behavior.
The ANA established the first code of nursing ethics decades ago.
The ANA reviews and revises the code regularly to reflect changes in
practice. However, basic principles of responsibility, accountability,
advocacy, and confidentiality remain constant.
Advocacy - ✔️ refers to the support of a particular cause. As a
nurse you advocate for the health, safety, and rights of patients, including
their right to privacy and their right to refuse treatment.
Responsibility - ✔️ refers to willingness to respect obligations
and to follow through on promises.
Accountability - ✔️ refers to the ability to answer for one's own
actions. Standards are set by The Joint Commission and the ANA. Health
care facilities have compliance officers who are responsible for making
,sure that the institution remains in compliance with standards and
regulations.
confidentiality - ✔️ The Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) mandates protection of the patient's
personal health information.
Your patient is about to undergo a controversial orthopedic procedure. The
procedure may cause periods of pain. Although nurses agree to do no harm,
this procedure may be the patient's only treatment choice. This example
describes the ethical principle of:
A. autonomy.
B. fidelity.
C. justice.
D. nonmaleficence. - ✔️ Answer: D
Rationale: Sometimes to improve a patient's condition, it is necessary to
perform a procedure that will cause pain for the patient. The nurse must
weigh the benefits and the risks with the patient in his or her quest to do
no harm.
Value - ✔️ A value is a personal belief about the worth of a given
idea, attitude, custom, or object that sets standards that influence behavior.
Values clarification - ✔️ Ethical dilemmas almost always occur in
the presence of conflicting values.
To resolve ethical dilemmas, one needs to distinguish among values, facts,
and opinion.
you learn to tolerate differences in a way that often (although not always)
becomes the key to the resolution of ethical dilemmas.
Deontology - ✔️ proposes a system of ethics that is perhaps most
familiar to health care practitioners. Deontology defines actions as right or
wrong based on their "right-making characteristics," such as fidelity to
promises, truthfulness, and justice. Deontology depends on a mutual
understanding of justice, autonomy, and goodness. But it still leaves room
for confusion to surface.
Utilitarianism - ✔️ Proposes that the value of something is
determined by its usefulness. This philosophy is also known as
, consequentialism because its main emphasis is on the outcome or
consequence of an action. A third term associated with this philosophy is
teleology, from the Greek word telos, meaning "end," or the study of ends or
final causes. The greatest good for the greatest number of people is the
guiding principle for determining right action in this system.
Feminist Ethics - ✔️ Focuses on the inequality between people;
Feminist ethics critiques conventional ethics such as deontology and
utilitarianism. It looks to the nature of relationships to guide participants
in making difficult decisions, especially relationships in which power is
unequal, or in which a point of view has become ignored or invisible.
Writers with a feminist perspective tend to concentrate more on practical
solutions than on theory. Feminist ethicists propose that the natural human
urge to be influenced by relationships is a positive value.
Ethics of Care - ✔️ Emphasizes the importance of understanding
relationships, especially as they are revealed in personal narratives;
promote a philosophy that focuses on understanding relationships,
especially personal narratives. An early proponent of the ethics of care
used the term the one-caring to identify the individual who provides care,
and the cared-for to refer to the patient or patients. In adopting this
language, the author hoped to emphasize the role of feelings.
Casuistry - ✔️ case-based reasoning; turns away from
conventional principles of ethics as a way to determine best actions and
focuses instead on an "intimate understanding of particular situations."
This approach to ethical discourse depends on finding consensus more
than an appeal to philosophical principle. As a strategy for solving
dilemmas, consensus building promotes respect and agreement rather than
a particular philosophy or moral system itself.
Nursing Point of View - ✔️ Nurses generally engage with patients
over longer periods of time than other disciplines.
Patients may feel more comfortable revealing information to nurses.
They are involved in intimate physical acts such as bathing, feeding, and
special procedures. As a result, patients and families may feel more
comfortable in revealing information not always shared with physicians or
other health care providers.
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