The Importance Of Legal And Ethical Issues In Nursing Practice

Ethical issues have always affected the role of the professional nurse. Efforts to enact this standard may cause conflict in health care settings in which the traditional roles of the nurse are delineated within a bureaucratic structure. Nurses have more direct contact with patients than one can even imagine, which plays a huge role in protecting the patients’ rights, and creating ethical issues for the nurses caring for the various patients they are assigned to. In this paper I will discuss some of the ethical and legal issues that nurses are faced with each and every day.

Nurse’s face ethical dilemmas every day in their nursing practice. No matter what specific role the nurse plays, these ethical dilemmas impact the nurses as well as the patients. Sometimes it’s no right solution to some of the dilemma we nurses face. First to describe what ethics is, it is the act of doing good by not causing harm to the individual involved.

Nurses are facing many legal or ethical dilemmas in their career. Nurses should combine knowledge of ethical and legal aspects of health care and professional values into nursing practice. It is very essential to know what kind of dilemmas nurses may face during their profession and how they have been dealt with in the past.

Nurses are constantly challenged by changes which occur in their practice environment and are under the influence of internal or external factors. Due to the increased complexity of the health system, nowadays nurses are faced with ethical and legal decisions and often come across dilemmas regarding patient care. From this perspective a good question to be raised would be whether or not nurses have the necessary background, knowledge and skills to make appropriate legal and ethical decisions. Even though most nursing programs cover the ethical and moral issues in health care, it is questionable if new nurses have the depth of knowledge and understanding of these issues and apply them in their practice

Nurses face ethical decisions frequently when giving patient care. These dilemmas can result from deciding how to allocate resources such as time or materials. Caring for patients from diverse backgrounds complicates decision-making when faced with dilemmas, because organizations that depend on standards of patient care that may not by culturally congruent. In these situations, the nurse must consider the patient’s beliefs and values along with the organization’s care expectations and bridge the gap between the two (Andrews and Boyle, 2016-a). In this post, I will describe ethical dilemmas with the current state of population health and health disparities, discuss the pros and cons of the Affordable Care Act, and explain how social justice

Judie has been experiencing cut backs at work in regards to the hospitals budget, and these cuts have impacted the quality of patient care. She is feeling conflicted because she feels that she is unable to adequately fulfill her duty of nonmalficence. Budgets are a necessary part of running a successful company or business, however, if these budget cuts negatively impact a nurses ability to deliver adequate patient care than that poses an ethical dilemma for the nurse manager (Judie).

The health care profession has many positions within the interconnected team that make up the field. Some personnel never place a hand on patients but others including nurses and physicians are always in contact with them. This interconnected world of study and practice places large amounts of stress on all members to maintain professional conduct and to follow management, hospital policy, and national board regulations. The legal and ethical obligations that are to be upheld by healthcare members, especially nursing staff, make for added pressure. This pressure, however, places many members in an uncomfortable position allowing them opportunities to either easily break regulation or uphold their ethical obligations. Uniquely, this position is where many tend to fail.

As nursing health care professional, there legal and ethical issues, in which are presented with the patients on a daily basis. Sometimes it can become quite challenging because the nurse has to learn to separate their personal belief or feeling in order to respect the patient’s wishes. The challenge being faced by the nurse with their daily nursing care goes back to the term autonomy. “Autonomy is closely linked to the notion of respect for persons, and is an important principle in cultures where all individuals are considered to be unique and valuable members of society” (Burkhardt and Nathaniel, 2007, pg. 53). Each patient has the right to make a choice about things in which affects their health. This paper

Nurses are faced with many ethical and legal issues, such as protecting and maintaining the patient privacy and confidentiality. “A dilemma can arise when confidential information is requested by family members or friends of the patient” (McGowan, 2012, p. 61). As nurses during our pinning ceremony we took the “the Nightingale Pledge promised to do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession, and hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping and all family affair” (McGowan, 2012, p. 61). Protecting and maintaining patient confidentiality is a serious matter and you can be fined and faced with federal charges, if you are found guilty.

During this week’s clinical, we discussed a situation where a man did not want to tell wife he had HIV; this would be considered an ethical dilemma.

Legal and Ethical Issues in Nursing Practice Background As a clinical research nurse coordinator on an alcohol treatment unit, my duties are to coordinate the care of research participant in an alcohol treatment program. As part of the research protocol, the participants are administered a daily morning dose of the anti-craving medication, Nalrexone for one month One morning I was assigned as a research nurse coordinator for one of the participant and I could not locate the physician’s order Naltrexone for the participant. I immediately went to the participant’s research study binder and notice for the past week, nurses assigned to the participant, indicated by their signature that they administered Naltrexone to the participant.

Respect for person involves autonomy, but not all individuals are able to acting autonomously. This requires the ability to set goals and make choices, and this may be compromised at times in a person’s life. Defined by the Belmont Report, respect for persons requires that these vulnerable individuals be offered special protections during periods when they cannot act autonomously.

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.

Professional relationships with patients and the developments in standard of care have made law paramount to the study and practice of nursing. Law helps keep up to date nursing practice in every stage of patient care making it important for nurses to understand the ethical and legal implications of law in their nursing profession (Griffith and Tengrah, 2011).

Legal issues in nursing are something every nurse should be aware of. A few issues that nurses may have to deal with throughout there care is, assault, battery, invasion of privacy, false imprisonment and negligence. As a nurse it is our responsibility to understand these issues, and understand how to avoid them. This means following protocols, policies, and rights of a patient, and also caring for a patient in a safe manner. For the purpose of this paper, I have chosen to write about assault, the legal definition, how it affects nursing, and how a nurse may violate this law and how a nurse can prevent them from stepping over that line.