Nursing practitioners since time immemorial have focused their practice around ethics. The focus on nursing ethics particularly by the nurses has, over the past few decades, been a highlight in nursing in care for the patients with the growing emphasis on the individual rights and individual autonomy. The scope nursing ethics thus expand due to development in unique issues.
Butts J. B. (2015), opines that nurses today are engaged in ethical decision making and behaviors arising from morality and relationships. This also spreads to performance of roles related to patient care and the relationship between the nurses themselves. Nurses are required to protect the moral space within which patients receive their care. When the patient agrees to divulge confidential medical information, the nurse is under an obligation not to give such information to a third party without the consent of the patient and only in the interest of the medical care enhancement of the patient or related and relevant patients. Nurses are expected to uphold the agreement with the patient on an individual and collective basis.
Protecting the moral space also demands that nurses give compassionate care by respecting the principles of autonomy, non-malfeasance, justice and beneficence....
Nurse’s responsibility is to act in the best interest of the patient. The benefits to the patient may include promoting the health of the patient and preventing any illness and most importantly mitigating suffering of patients who may be suffering from physical, psychological and spiritual pains.
The duties of a nurse sometimes involve hard moral choices and can cause moral distress, resulting in emotional and physical suffering. Moral distress occurs when a nurse is faced with varying levels of compromised moral integrity. For instance, a patient has been diagnosed with a terminal illness but the nurse tries to avoid telling her about the truth of her health status to avoid discouraging and breaking her down. Jameton (1984) defined this kind of situation as knowing the right thing to do but having constraints in the institutional structure making it impossible to pursue the right course of action. In such situation nurses are expected to be guided to act in the benefit of the patient and to avoid at all cost any action that may harm the patient.
References
Butts J. B. (2015). Ethics in Professional Nursing Practice. Retrieved 16, Sept 2017 from http://samples.jbpub.com/9781284059502/Chapter_3_Sample.pdf
