The nursing profession defines offering service to patients. Therefore, ethics guide nurses and outline the framework of ensuring safety for patients, their own safety, and that of their colleagues at the workplace. Nurses pledge to adhere to ethical codes that revolve around upholding the safety of patients and saving their life. Subsequently, ethical codes and standards shape their behavior and responsibility to the societies they serve. In a specific context, the nursing ethics covers areas of patient confidentiality, truthfulness, and honesty with the patients, seeking informed consent of patient ahead of medical procedures, and dealing with beliefs and theories that offer conflicting arguments to empirical knowledge. Notably, the codes of ethics in nursing have some elements of ambiguity due to the fact that they do not offer complete and absolute rules.
The current State of Science
The current codes of ethics in nursing are universal across the world and require nurses to maintain a high level of professionalism in providing care for patients. Specifically, nurses are expected to always seek informed consent from their patients prior to executing a medical procedure on them. Informed consent implies that the nurse offers an explanation to the patient on the procedure, its positive and negative effects, and giving them the privilege of assenting to receiving the treatment. Confidentiality is yet another key standard that is expected of nurses to maintain. Nurses come across the personal information of patients as they care for them. The current state of ethics requires that nurses keep that information to themselves by maintaining confidentiality with the information. Maintaining confidentiality infers that nurses avoid disseminating information on the patient’s state of condition, diagnosis, and other personal details. Therefore, they are expected to avoid identifying patients with their names and personal identification details. Telling the truth is yet another universal standard of ethics that is expected of nurses across the world. Patients trust nurses with information. Therefore, nurses are expected to be truthful by telling patients the truth about their conditions and what they should expect from a medical procedure. Nurses are also ethically responsible for streamlining the conflicts that exist between perceptions and empirical knowledge. Nursing ethics also covers the responsibility of protecting the rights of patients and making surrogate decisions, among others.
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Gaps in Knowledge
There are various gaps in knowledge and implementation that limit the ability of nurses to exhaustively adhere to the ethical standards, something that creates ethical dilemmas. Understaffing is one primary cause of the gap between the nurses’ understanding of ethics and their ability to uphold them. Nursing shortages is a problem that has existed for decades and have brought about various problems, including the inability of nurses to effectively uphold nursing ethics (Erlen, 2004). Inadequacy of staff can make the work of nurses quite difficult, especially limiting their ability to communicate, ensure patient safety, and build a good relationship between them and their patients. Specifically, understaffing make nurses get worked out, exhausted, thus limiting their abilities to uphold the required standards of care especially maximizing on upholding the safety of their patients. In addition to that, a gap also exists on the matter of protecting the rights of the patients. In most cases, patients lack an understanding of treatment procedure (Lejman et al., 2013). Therefore, it is the responsibility of nurses and other medical practitioners to educate them and effectively protect their rights. Nonetheless, conflict may exist been a doctor and a nurse, making it difficult for a nurse to defy them. For example, when a doctor dismisses certain symptoms by a patient, it becomes somehow difficult for a nurse to advocate for the rights of the patient. A gap also exists between nurses and their responsibility to protect patients’ rights caused by a tendency by patients to conceal important information on their status of health.
Practical Aspects of Implementation
Despite the knowledge held by nurses on the need to uphold ethics, they cannot perfect in maintaining high standards of ethics. Understaffing disables nurses from effectively working within their reach to maintain ethics. They get overwhelmed, get tired are in no position to protect patients from safety. Hospitals and healthcare systems should simply employ more nurses and healthcare practitioners to enable workers to work within their energy to maintain high ethical standards. Speaking a different language with other healthcare practitioners also denies nurses their ability to uphold ethics. Serving patients in hospitals is a joint effort, and all practitioners should be guided by similar ethical codes. When other practitioners fail to uphold ethical codes, nurses struggle to protect the patients from violation of rights, something that can get them to disagree with other healthcare practitioners.
Systematic Changes that would be Needed
To bridge the gap, healthcare systems should invest in investing in increasing resources for healthcare institutions to ensure that nurses are not overwhelmed with work. Specifically, healthcare systems should employ more nurses in healthcare facilities to reduce the ratio between nurses and patients. Subsequently, nurses shall have more time to deliver services to patients, offer maximum care, and work towards ensuring patient safety. When the ratio of nurses to patients is reduced, nurses will be in a better position to address all the problems of all patients and uphold high standards of ethics. Healthcare systems should partner with nursing schools to ensure that they prepare their students in accordance with the requirements of healthcare institutions. Additionally, another appropriate change can be training doctors and other healthcare practitioners to work towards maintaining the standards of care while considering nursing ethics. This simply refers to streamlining their job descriptions to ensure that they work on achieving a similar goal (Fox et al., 2010). This can be achieved by healthcare institutions set their own goals to enable their healthcare workers to uphold high standards of ethics.
Biggest Challenge
As noted above, the biggest challenge is the issue of little resources and the issue of understaffed healthcare institutions. This can be considered a big threat because it is a problem that affects most healthcare institutions in many countries. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened it because nurses have been on the frontline and have thus, suffered the most as a career center. Therefore, it counts as the biggest challenge. It is also important to note that solving the problem of understaffing is something that would take a long to implement for countries and healthcare institutions. The problem of hiring takes a long and may be difficult to solve at once. Moreover, hospitals must maintain constant hiring to replace nurses who retire to solve the problem and bring about a lasting solution.
There is likely to be a problem in the future with upholding confidentiality by nurses. At the rate at which technology is consuming the world, it is easy to predict that healthcare delivery via online platforms is something inevitable in the future. Technology devices are vulnerable to access through cyber-terrorism. Therefore, in the future, while nurses using technology to deliver services such as gathering care information, such information might be accessed, leading to a breach of confidentiality of the patient information.
Conclusion
In summary, nursing ethics exist and are universal. They revolve around the patient because the work of nurses is simply geared towards offering service to patients. The codes cover the issues of upholding patient privacy under confidentiality, ensuring patient safety, truthfulness, bridging the gap between beliefs and empirical knowledge, and making surrogate decisions, among others. The main gaps that exist to limit the ability of nurses to uphold ethics are understaffed healthcare institutions and barriers made by the lack of clear communication between nurses and other practitioners. Nurses get overwhelmed with work to the extent that they cannot uphold ethical standards. Nurses also fail to uphold standards when other practitioners handling the same patients fail to do so. Therefore, this can be solved by hiring more nurses and drawing hospital goals to enable healthcare practitioners to work to uphold a common goal of ethics.
References
Erlen, J. A. (2004). Wanted—nurses: ethical issues and the nursing shortage. Orthopaedic Nursing , 23 (4), 289-292.
Fox, E., Bottrell, M. M., Berkowitz, K. A., Chanko, B. L., Foglia, M. B., & Pearlman, R. A. (2010). IntegratedEthics: An innovative program to improve ethics quality in health care. Innovation Journal , 15 (2), 1-36.
Lejman, E., Westerbotn, M., Pöder, U., & Wadensten, B. (2013). The ethics of coercive treatment of people with dementia. Nursing ethics , 20 (3), 248-262.
