Ethics in Nursing
Every professional in the field of healthcare has a special responsibility and obligation to treat patients with care and dignity -- and at all times there should be an ethical approach as well. Nurses, too, is a vitally important component of healthcare, are nurses are certainly bound by ethical rules and values, and this paper delves into the various aspects of ethics in nursing.
Ethics and Nursing
"Codes of ethics refer to systems of rules and principles by which a profession is expected to regulate the moral behavior of its members and demonstrate its responsibility to society" (Numminen, et al., 2011, p. 710).
Ethics in nursing boils down to taking responsibility for providing good care to patients, being fair, professional and just, Zane Wolf writes in the peer-reviewed journal Nursing. But there is more to it than just offering professional care, Wolf continues. The author, who is the Dean and Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences at La Salle University in Philadelphia, notes that while the majority of nurses are "…committed to the welfare of their patients" there are exceptions (Wolf, 2012, p. 16). Those exceptions include nurses that "…display controlling, angry, or distancing responses to patients" and also those nurses that make mistakes either from acting "recklessly and intentionally" (Wolf, 16). In both cases the lack of ethical considerations is blatantly obvious and cannot be tolerated in the nursing field.
While conducting research through the literature on nursing and ethics, Wolf found too many instances of "…incivility in nursing education" displayed by faculty as well as nursing students (16). And since nursing programs are "…the first filters of character for the profession" Wolf believes that there needs to be changes in nursing programs (16). In fact the author asserts that a better assessment of the "personal characteristics of applicants to nursing programs" needs to be made.
There certainly are "unsuitable applicants" that get into nursing programs and too often they become the nurses that Wolf cites as showing "incivility" towards their patients (16). In order to weed out unsuitable applicants to nursing program Wolf suggests two ideas: a) the "emotional intelligence of applicants should be assessed before admission...
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