Legal And Ethical Issues In Nursing Practice

is a nurse practicing in Missouri that has, already, previously been placed on probation for testing positive for heroin. She has recently had a relapse in her recovery and is fighting to get her license back so she can practice nursing. The state board has already given her one chance and she was practicing in Missouri. She has been sober for nearly 3 years and has taken suboxone the entire time of her sobriety to help with withdrawal. E.M. hates that she has a dependency on the suboxone and wanted very badly to wean herself off of it. She spoke with her physician about this matter and her physician strongly suggested that she not be taken completely off her prescription of suboxone. Her physician lowered her dose and she began taking a lower dose. After time passed, E.M. felt like she had things under control and she completely stopped taking her prescription. E.M. went under some stress at her job and ended up leaving the facility she was working at. She knew that one of her old co-workers had access to heroin and after running into him at a local store, she started abusing again. Beginning at the time of her first time being placed on probation E.M. has been required to provide urine samples at randomly selected intervals. During her time of remission, when she was abusing, she failed to call and leave urine samples. At this time, E.M. explained that she was focusing on bettering herself and working on her sobriety. I feel that E.M. was very sincere and was accountable for her actions. She truthfully took responsibility for her wrongful actions. E.M. stated that she now realizes that her heroin addiction is a lifelong addiction that will always be knocking at her door and she cannot stop taking suboxone. The board questioned her and wanted to make sure she did not have plans of going against her physician’s orders again. E.M. was in tears almost the entire time she was explaining her actions to the members of the board and I feel like they were true

Within this assignment it is intended to present an example of a prescribing situation that arose in practice, to ensure prescribing issues are illustrated. The rationale for the decisions reached will also be discussed. A brief overview of the nurse prescribing initiative and how it developed will be addressed. The importance of ethical principles, accountability and legal issues that surround nurse prescribing will be demonstrated. As a patient will be addressed in the example, a pseudonym will be used.

a) Pharmacists have ethical and legal obligations to ensure that the prescriptions they fill are valid, both in that the physician must be prescribing the medication for a valid reason and that the person filling the prescription must be doing so for valid therapeutic reasons (ASHP, 2008; Brushwood, n.d.). The court needs to take these obligations into account, and then must determine whether the frequency with which the prescription was refilled would have required a pharmacist to check with the patient's physician or at least another pharmacist in order to determine if the pattern represented abuse (Brushwood, n.d.). The basic considerations before the court, then, are the pattern of behavior (i.e. prescription refilling) represented in the facts and the relationship of this pattern to the legal and ethical standards of pharmacists. The addition was certainly a foreseeable consequence, and this means that standard applications of negligence torts might also be applicable.

While we can’t know what the decision of the board was on this occasion, I cannot help but wonder at T. O.’s attitude at the hearing we were present for that day. Given that she’s been a nurse for 34 years, she seemed nonchalant about hoarding old prescriptions, which is how she claimed to have failed the drug screen in question. She believed an old prescription from 2014 for Restoril had caused the positive test for oxazepam. This is one thing that stood out to me, due to the fact that the nurses who visited us from the State Board of Nursing several months ago made it a point to stress to us not to hoard our old prescriptions, because it can have a bearing on our nursing license.

This case is a result of a seventy-two year old woman that died in the care of a nursing facility after being transferred from the hospital due to an overdose in morphine. When the victim was transferred to the nursing home, the nurse practitioner on duty at the time noticed the double prescription of morphine on the orders and instructed a nurse on duty to confirm with the hospital pharmacist that this was intentional or if they should be revised. The nurse obeyed orders and the transferring hospital’s pharmacist confirmed that the orders were correct, so the victim was admitted.

Every medical professional has or will face some ethical and legal issues in the Medical Field, the Nurse Practitioners (NP) are no different. Fant stated that in an ethical dilemma there are no right answers or solutions; however, in these dilemmas there are no wrong answers either. Sule feels that the ethical issues for NPs are in consent and capacity, confidentiality and autonomy, and in the non-compliance on part of patient. Offredy and Townsend both feel that a breech in clinical governance and management can cause

This ethical issue that I have decided to write about is a matter that has occurred in many medical facilities across the world. I have made up some names for this case study but the incident is real. This case study involves a physician named Derek Johnson M.D. This physician worked with numerous of nurses and other health care professionals and most of them believed Dr. Johnson had a narcotics problem. The health care providers did not know for sure if this physician was using narcotics they could only speculate and they had some evidence that Dr. Johnson was illegally using the narcotics. The health care providers thought Dr Johnson was illegally using anesthesia. The reason the other health care

After termination of the study, the government implemented and has regulated several changes that impact nursing and public policy today. After ethical concerns had been publically raised and the study was terminated, the National Research Act was signed into law in 1974. This policy was used in the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which proved helpful in identifying policy issues such as the lack of identified basic principles of research conduct and lack of informed consent. Regulations were passed according to this panel’s recommendations that required voluntary consent from all persons involved in studies which are funded or conducted by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) (CDC, 2013). For nurses, this involves a responsibility to ensure that research participants are advocated for and the consent being obtained is used as an educational, informative

In a hospital setting, the LPN works under the RN and it is the duty of the RN to make sure that when she assigns patients, that the LPN has knowledgeable understanding of her expected duties to ensure the safety of the patient, which includes administering the proper medication as well as dosage. In the event that this is not done properly, this can be very detrimental to the patient, often causing death. For example, if an LPN accidentally administers the wrong medication to a patient, because he/she failed to check the patients armband for proper identification but reported it to her superior, the RN and in return the RN did not make a report but instead monitored the patient which took a turn for the worse and expired. This of course would prompt the family to take swift legal action. The physician would not be held accountable, but both nurses would more than likely have their license revoked by the state board of nursing.

When I was helping to sort through an occurrence report, I was faced with the devastating effect on a nurse who was directly involved in the delivery of the wrong medication to a patient. The event occurred while she was attending a rapid critical care response. The patient was ordered a high risk medication after she completed her nursing assessment, she received a physician’s order for an IV push medication. The nurse prepared it from the emergency medication supply, verbally checked the high risk medication with another nurse and proceeded to deliver it to the patient. Initially the nurse did not realize anything was wrong, but recognized the wrong vial was selected upon returning another vial to the unused medications return bin. As soon as she noted the error, she reported it to the team and the appropriate actions were taken to assess and support the patient, who was thankfully unharmed by the error.

Civil rights lawsuit could be an issue if a nurse does not know the law enforcement law about the importance of informed consent from a patient. I have learned that obtaining informed consent before any procedure whether a hospital procedure or in conducting a research could prevent complications. In conducting a research, I should listen to the participants’ voices and closely pay attention to their emotions, feelings and rights as an individual in accordance with the variances in

One year ago an unethical incident happened at the facility I was employed at. As a Certified Nursing Assistant we were permitted to distribute medications to patients/residents under the supervision of an RN and with the required training. The unethical decision was made by my coworker, who made the choice to steal an extensive amount of Vicodin and other painkillers from a residents supply.

Professional nurses encounter a variety of legal ethical and bioethical issues on a daily basis. For this reason, it is essential that all nurses are aware of current state and national legislation, acts and guidelines and the implications of these for nursing practices as well as legal processes, principles of open disclosure and the role of a coroner in the health sector. In this way, nurses can adhere to the overarching guidelines for practice as well as working within the code of conduct, competency standards and scope of practice. This paper will provide an overview of legal and ethical parameters of professional nursing practice.

In the case scenario, the nurse did not apply her knowledge to check the correct adult dosage of methadone. Methadone is a narcotic pain reliever, similar to morphine (Hodgson, 2011). When administering narcotics, it is required to have someone co-sign the MAR sheet to double-check with you (by using the five rights). The nurse was not able to use her critical thinking when she administered methadone. If she was a trained nurse, she would have realized it right away that there is something wrong with the dosage amount. There is a big difference between milliliter and milligram.

Nursing mistakes happen all the time and are considered errors to learn form and correct. Sometimes though, nurses make mistakes intentionally while practicing that are detrimental to patients and even themselves. These kinds of mistakes usually result in loss of license in most cases. However, if a nurse creates a situation in which protocol or state laws are broken disciplinary actions occur like in the case of Tina Chadwick. Tina, a registered nurse in SC, was tried for having a positive marijuana screening as well as multiple counts of documentation errors involving narcotics. She reported to having made the errors purposefully to cover her tracks of taking the narcotics for personal use. She was put on probation after the discovery of mal charting practices and was enrolled into a rehabilitation program.