Friday, July 3, 2015

Nursing is hard. Unaddressed ethical issues make it even harder.

Nursing is hard. Unaddressed ethical issues make it even harder.

The article I read describes a couple who had just had delivered a baby at 22 weeks. The nurse knew the baby wouldn’t survive so she told the parents that the baby was stillborn. The dad looked the baby to his right lying dying in the warmer and could clearly see that their baby was breathing. Furious of the precious moments that lost, that escalated the matter. The ethical issue here is that the nurse lied to the family. The ethical dilemmas faced by nurses include everything from speaking up about how a staffing shortage impacts quality of care to deciding how to allocate scarce resources like donor organs or blood. Ethics can be the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it, but it's not going anywhere. Bedrosian believes “it's possible to mobilize the collective voice of nurses to participate in conversations with policymakers, hospital administration, physicians organizations, and insurance companies to create a culture where ethical practice is valued and encouraged” (Bedrosian 1).


Bedrosian Der Jeanette. Nursing is hard. Unaddressed ethical issues make it even harder. http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2015/summer/nursing-ethics-and-burnout . Retrieved July 3, 2015.


Rosenstand, Nina (2012-07-01). The Moral of the Story: An Introduction to Ethics, 7th edition (Page 277). McGraw-Hill Higher Education -A. Kindle Edition.

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