Ethic in Healthcare
Class Nursing 521 week 1 discussion board
Moral Survey: Base on this question that I answer (Ethic in Healthcare )you need to response the following questions:
Discussion Prompt #1
· Reflect upon the survey you took. In your initial response, address some of the following questions. Explain your answers.
· Did you find it easy to make confident and decisive decisions with several strongly agree or strongly disagree answers, or did you select mostly moderate responses?
· Did any subject areas trigger personal emotions or issues? If so, do you feel you were able to remain objective?
· Were any of the decisions especially difficult to make?
· Did you employ any critical thinking or resolution strategies to determine a response?
· Did you rely on policy or legal parameters to make your decisions?
· Would you be comfortable making your answers to the survey public, or do you prefer anonymity?
· Have you dealt with similar situations and could you perceive similar situations occurring in your clinical practice?
· How might a moral inventory such as this survey impact your clinical practice?
APA and References.
Survey Questions
· Question 1
| Physician assisted suicide (PAS) remains a controversial practice in terminal illness cases, and has been railroaded in most states. Only three states allow PAS at this time. Consider your role in counseling a patient seeking PAS services. Your patient is under 30 years old and believes that quality of life comes first over compromising medical treatments. The patient has therefore made a clear decision to forgo traditional medical treatment due to poor prognosis and the likelihood that medical treatment will only give an additional three to six months to live. Do you remain supportive of the patient’s decision to pursue PAS? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 2
| Although cases of eugenic sterilization are now relatively rare, sterilization without consent was performed with some regularity decades ago amongst state institutionalized patients with extreme cases of mental illness or retardation. Sterilizations were also performed on patients who were poor, of color, or who signed consents for sterilization procedures when they did not understand what they were signing. In unethical situations such as these, does the nurse have the responsibility to be the whistleblower, even if it means personal scrutiny or loss of livelihood? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 3
| A police officer brings an intoxicated patient to your addiction recovery center. As a nurse at the detox unit, you are used to dealing with belligerent and intoxicated patients. In this case you are concerned because of the length of time it took for the police officer to bring the patient into detox relative to the time the person was picked up, per the police report. In examining the patient, you see a number of bruises and lacerations over the person’s arms, neck, and trunk, but when you question the patient about how the injuries occurred, the patient says he doesn’t remember. You suspect that the police officer may have assaulted and abused the person. You are unsure how to pursue your suspicions, and you regularly interface with this particular officer. You decide that you don’t have enough evidence to make a report and say nothing about your suspicions to your supervisor or coworkers. Have you violated the ANA Code of Ethics by remaining silent? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 4
| You are a nurse in an OR and have noticed that patients are not achieving adequate pain relief intraoperatively and postoperatively. You are very concerned. Procedurally, you can see nothing different in how the anesthesia or narcotics are being administered. However, time and again, patients are complaining of inadequate pain relief. You know the certified nurse anesthetist (CRNA) almost lost his license last year when it was suspected that he was abusing fentanyl, and you worry that he may be stealing fentanyl and covering it up, but you cannot be sure since the ampules of fentanyl that are pulled from the Pyxis appear to be intact. You speak with your supervisor and it comes to light that the employee under investigation is someone other than the CRNA. Are you obligated to share your concerns about the CRNA with the state board of nursing? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 5
| The payroll director of your hospital was recently sued for embezzlement. He was caught when a fired employee called the hospital to say that her W-2 tax form showed more payment than she had actually received. An investigation determined that the director had deposited the employee’s additional pay into his bank account and had done this multiple times with other employees. You discover that one of the directors of nursing who you work closely with, and who is a friend of the payroll director, is also under investigation for aiding and abetting the embezzlement scheme. The circumstances have generated a lot of fear and distrust amongst hospital staff and it has fallen to you to provide support to your nursing staff. Are you legally obligated to discuss specifics regarding the case with those staff directly affected by the embezzlement? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 6
| The mother of your pediatric patient in the emergency room is a Jehovah’s Witness and she has informed you that her daughter cannot get the blood transfusion needed to save her life. The matter is taken before the ethics committee of the hospital in an attempt to negotiate with the child’s mother for the life-saving transfusion that her child needs. In the end, the physician’s right to administer emergency medical treatment over the parent’s objections was allowed, but the physician was also protected from liability in the event he had chosen to honor the parent’s refusal of treatment. In general, the law does not dictate the physician’s action, and the physician’s decision is ultimately a moral one. | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 7
| You are a pediatric nurse and you have noticed a growing trend in the last five years of children who are identifying as transgender. The physician you work with has begun offering administration of cross-sex hormones to children identifying as transgender who wish to transition. You feel some internal conflict in certain cases about the decision to offer puberty-blocking cross-sex hormones to children who are not of legal age to make the decision, but who have lived with the stigma of expressing in the opposite sex their whole lives. In spite of your internal conflict, you have a moral obligation to remain supportive to these patients. | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 8
| You are working in an infertility clinic as a nurse and are aware that the physician you work with chose to transfer more than five embryos into your patient when normally the physician transfers only two. When you read the patient’s chart, you discover that part of the justification is that the embryos were not all of the best quality when graded; there was a quality issue amongst the embryos in general, but the patient insisted they be transferred regardless of their quality. The woman ends up with a quintuplet pregnancy and sues the physician. Was the patient within her rights to sue the physician when she had expressly requested the embryo transfer even though their quality contradicted the usual transfer criteria and protocol? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 9
| A nurse that was working as a health care worker in a camp for Ebola victims developed a low-grade fever the day of her flight but did not develop other Ebola symptoms, such as nausea and vomiting, until she had landed in the United States. Was she negligent to other passengers and airline personnel for flying with a low-grade fever? | ||||||||||||||
|
· Question 10
| You are a nurse practitioner providing prenatal care in a community health center. A patient who regularly receives medication for chronic pain and who is a known opioid addict presents as a prenatal patient on your schedule. It is early in her pregnancy and you decide that weaning her from the pain medication now would be the best option. The patient herself is in agreement and goes home with your plan of tapering the dose over the next month, but instead abruptly stops all pain medication without your knowledge. You receive a hospital report three weeks later that the patient was admitted to the hospital for opioid withdrawal and miscarriage. The patient states you told her to stop the pain medications and you are now under investigation for medical malpractice. When patients do not follow medical advice and end up with a poor outcome, providers are always protected as long as their plan is well documented in the patient’s chart. | ||||||||||||||||
|
APA and References.
