The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay.

As an advanced practice nurse, you will run into situations where a patient’s wishes about his or her health conflict with evidence, your own experience, or a family’s wishes. This may create an ethical dilemma. What do you do when these situations occur? In this Lab Assignment, you will explore evidence-based practice guidelines and ethical considerations for specific scenarios. The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay.

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Review the scenarios provided by your instructor for this week’s Assignment. Based on the scenarios provided: Select one scenario, and reflect on the material presented throughout this course. What necessary information would need to be obtained about the patient through health assessments and diagnostic tests? Consider how you would respond as an advanced practice nurse. Review evidence-based practice guidelines and ethical considerations applicable to the scenarios you selected. CASE STUDY: A 49-year-old woman with advanced stage cancer has been admitted to the emergency room with cardiac arrest. Her husband and one of her children accompanied the ambulance. The Lab Assignment Write a detailed one-page narrative (not a formal paper) explaining the health assessment information required for a diagnosis of your selected patient (include the scenario number). Explain how you would respond to the scenario as an advanced practice nurse using evidence-based practice guidelines and applying ethical considerations. Justify your response using at least three different references from current evidence-based literature.The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay.

The Ethics behind Assessment
Scenario 2
For patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses, end of life care discussions is apparent. Optimal palliative care starts with an open, honest discussion of the disease prognosis and progression. In this scenario, a 49-year-old woman is admitted to the emergency room after a cardiac attack. The patient has a positive diagnosis of advanced-stage cancer. Effective diagnosis for the patient relies on crucial health assessment information. According to Link et al. (2015), it would be crucial to determine a cardiac arrest using an ECG test and perform life-saving measures as per the Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) protocol. An ECG test would assess the heart’s electrical activity to reveal heart rhythm and electrical pattern abnormalities that heighten the risk of sudden death for a patient.The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay. The ACLS algorithm simplifies the treatment of patients experiencing or progressing towards cardiovascular emergencies, most of which are associated with arrhythmia, which must be treated using ACLS. The most frequently utilized ACLS algorithm is the cardiac arrest algorithm.
After stabilizing the patient, an advanced practice nurse would respond to the scenario in a variety of ways. First, it would be imperative to inquire from the husband when the patient had an advanced directive such as a living will concerning the right to resuscitate. Advanced directives are legal documents that inform the physician of the type of medical care to provide when patients are unable to communicate due to dementia, terminal illnesses, coma, or serious injuries (Peicius et al., 2017). A living will is a type of advanced directive that describes the treatment a patient would want if they were unconscious permanently or terminally ill. The treatments are meant to increase longevity, and the living will do not give anyone the authority to make decisions on behalf of the patient.The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay. In some US states, the next of kin can supersede the patients’ remarks in the advanced directives when parents are unconscious or lack the mental capacity to make informed decisions. The patient should only be resuscitated after a decision has been made. Here, all attempts to resuscitate the patient should then be made. In this scenario, it is incredibly crucial for the attending physician to embrace medical ethics and respect the wishes of the patient and his family. Suppose the patient and her family reach into a consensus that all interventions should be made to improve longevity, including life support. In that case, the physician should examine the patient’s brain functioning for the extent of damage and instability.
Ganapathy (2018) asserts that a brain death study comprising 24 EEG, CT, and MRI heads effectively identifies brain death in patients. Evaluation of brain death is conducted in patients suffering from irreversible brain injuries. The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay.The author defines brain death as the complete and irreversible stopping of all brain functions. Legally, brain death is the definition of death. Notable findings in brain death are apnoea, lack of brainstem reflexes, and coma. A patient determined to have brain death is clinically and legally dead. After establishing brain death, the next step for the advanced practice nurse would be to discuss with the family to remove the patient from life support and change her resuscitation status to ‘do not resuscitate.’ A doctor writes the order in the presence of two physicians to prevent cardiopulmonary resuscitation if a patient’s heart and brain stop functioning. To avoid ethical conflicts, the nurse should not remove the patient from life support or change resuscitation orders without consent from the patient’s family.The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay.

References
Ganapathy, K. (2018). Brain death revisited. Neurology India, 66(2), 308. https://doi.org/10.4103/0028-3886.227287
Link, M., Berkow, L., Kudenchuk, P., Halperin, H., Hess, E., & Moitra, V. et al. (2015). Part 7: Adult Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support. Circulation, 132(18 suppl 2), S444-S464. https://doi.org/10.1161/cir.0000000000000261
Peicius, E., Blazeviciene, A., & Kaminskas, R. (2017). Are advance directives helpful for good end of life decision making: a cross sectional survey of health professionals. BMC Medical Ethics, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0197-6

The Ethics Behind Assessment Essay.