Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay

Choose a case from the AMA Journal of Ethics Case Index https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/cases and take a position. For this assignment you will evaluate the ethical arguments for or against the issue. Identify the potential legal arguments (consider current federal guidelines), indicate any potential professional code conflicts you foresee, and support your position with an explanation of your own ethical/moral foundation.Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay

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In your 2-3 page paper:

Identify the issue and state your ethical position.
How might this scenario play out or impact you in your role as a nurse practitioner?
Defend your position with legal, ethical, and professional evidence.
As part of your position, propose strategies and solutions for addressing the issues.
What other ethical issues does this case bring to light, if any?
Support your position with at least one scholarly source (it may be your text). Be sure to cite the article you choose, use APA format, and include a title page and reference page.

Nurses everywhere have long struggled with ethical challenges in patient care. In fact, in Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing, she discussed ethical duties of confidentiality, communication, and the centrality of meeting patients’ needs (Nightingale, 1859; Ulrich & Zeitzer, 2009). Similarly, nurses today are bound to uphold the foundational moral virtues, duties and principles central to the nursing profession. However, it has become increasingly difficult for nurses in all parts of the world to practise with integrity amidst the complex moral choices and pressures that nurses confront.Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay

Today’s healthcare environment is demanding for nurses at a time when there is a critical shortage of staff to meet the multifaceted needs of patients. An ethical issue can occur in any healthcare situation where profound moral questions of “rightness” or “wrongness” underlie professional decision-making and the beneficent care of patients. For example, critical care nurses often face suffering head-on, and might question the balance between the value of attempts to preserve a patient’s life and aggressive physiological measures that appear to prolong anguish and yield no fruitful outcome. Understandably, all members of the healthcare team, including nurses, can be affected by ethical decisions as they address the stressful and sometimes exhausting nature of working through ethical problems.Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay

BACKGROUND
This study was guided by nursing, ethics, and health services theory and literature. Rest’s (1986) four-component model of ethical decision-making identifies the importance of recognizing ethical issues that evolve from the social, cultural, and organizational environment in which one is embedded. The ethical issue or problem needs to be identified by the moral agent before moral decision-making processes can be activated. Thus, individuals may differ not only in their recognition of the moral or ethical issues they encounter but also in how they respond. Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay This could vary by age, gender, ethnicity, years in practice or some other identified factors. Additionally, the intensity in which nurses experience these ethical issues or problems can influence the degree to which they engage in moral behavior (Jones 1991). Thus, it is essential to identify the ethical problems nurses face, the frequency with which they confront them, and the level of stress they produce.

Many of the studies that focus on ethical problems in nursing practice produce data unique to a particular specialty area. Such study topics include ethical issues in restraint use in mental health (Redman & Fry, 2003); providing care to high risk neonates (van Zuuren & van Manen, 2006; Janvier et al. 2007; Kain, 2007; Epstein, 2008); initiating, withholding, and withdrawing treatment and advance directives in acute and long-term care (Crego & Lipp 1998; Burns et al. 2001; Redman & Fry 2003); conflict resolution in parent-child-provider relationships in pediatric care (Butz et al. 1998); and physician collaboration, autonomy, and insurance constraints in advanced practice (Laabs 2005; Ulrich et al. 2007).Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay

Studies have shown that nurses, more often than their physician colleagues, feel that end-of-life ethical issues are not thoroughly discussed within the care team or with families and significant others (Levi et al. 2004). Preliminary studies (Corley et al. 2005) have explored professionals’ experiences of ethical stress related to their inability to take moral action.

Redman and Fry (2003) published exploratory work on what is known about ethical conflicts among nurse leaders. Fry and Duffy (2001) developed and tested a tool (Ethical Issues Scale) to assess the full range of ethical issues experienced by nurses in current practice and the frequency of their occurrences. Seventy-nine percent of the 934 nurses surveyed by the American Nurses Association Center for Ethics and Human Rights at the ANA Convention in 1994 reported confronting ethical issues in practice daily (43%) or weekly (36%).Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay  Over 50% of these nurses identified the following four issues as the most frequent: cost-containment issues that jeopardized patient welfare; end-of-life decisions; breaches of patient confidentiality; and incompetent, unethical or illegal practices of colleagues. Pain management, use of advance directives, informed consent for procedures, access to healthcare, issues in the care of persons with HIV/AIDs, and providing “futile” treatment completed the list of 10 (Scanlon 1994). Previous researchers, however, have not explored the type, frequency, and level of stress that ethical problems engender in nurses across practice specialties. Week 3 Contemporary Issue Position Ethics Essay