Ethical issues in healthcare have become important in the world today as a result of failures in health facilities. Healthcare providers are faced with several ethical dilemmas during their practice (Milliken, 2018). The ethical issues that healthcare providers come across cover a wide variety of areas arising from primary health care to end of life cases. Conflicts often occur in health care facilities, which are a result of trying to resolve ethical dilemmas and difficulties that arise in the routine of health care providers (Rasoal et al., 2017). Even though most people do not put an effort to learn, the fact is proper communication skills are needed to be implemented by case managers to avoid clinical ethics conflicts in health care facilities.
In most cases, healthcare professionals are forced to violate ethical principles when faced with an ethical dilemma and trying to resolve them. The core ethical principles; i.e. autonomy, beneficence and nonmaleficence are the most violated principles when an ethical dilemma emerges (Milliken, 2018). Due to this, clinical health support has been developed to help with the clinical ethical difficulties that arise in healthcare facilities. Clinical ethics consultation, moral case deliberation, clinical ethics committees, ethics discussion groups, ethics rounds, and ethics reflection groups are some of the clinical ethical support developed (Rasoal et al., 2017). The clinical ethics committee consists of case managers who take over conflicts that arise as a result of ethical dilemmas. Therefore case managers need to develop effective and efficient communication skills as these skills help in case management and effective decision making.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Giving an example of an ethical dilemma is a nurse who is taking care of a patient who is at the end of life stage prostate cancer. Mr. Peter, who is the patient, discloses his suicidal thoughts to his nurse and asks him to be secretive about it. Kevin, who is the nurse of the patient, finds himself in an ethical dilemma. In this case, the ethical dilemma is whether Kevin should inform the other health care team members about Peter’s attempt of suicide without the patient’s consent. In this situation, the nurse considers the various clinical ethical principles to make the decision and the way forward out of the dilemma. After considerations, the nurse decided to violet the principle of autonomy and went ahead with the beneficence principle, telling the other health care providers.
In this suicidal attempt case, a case manager can use effective communication skills to drive away from the suicidal thought out of the patient. Moreover, good communication skills can help a case manager to know the reasons for the suicidal attempt and effectively sharing them with the nursing team for proper nursing intervention and the family members (Rasoal et al., 2017). Therefore to successfully do the above, the case manager needs communication skills such as good listening skills, interpersonal skills, and the ability to influence, negotiate an interview. In addition to that, the ability to share crucial information with diverse groups is also essential in handling ethical dilemma case (Rasoal et al., 2017). For the composition of documents and reports of dilemma cases, writing skills are also necessary.
For the case mentioned above, a case manager responsible for handling the case is supposed first to build a good relationship with the patient and the nursing team. With good listening skills, the case manager can try initiating conversations with the patient and be able to pick out relevant information related to the causes of the thought. This includes the ability to interpret verbal and non-verbal communication from the patients. Likewise, he can be able to communicate verbally and non-verbally in a way that he can influence and interview the patient leading to the patient disclosing the causes of the suicidal attempt. This way, the case manager can, therefore, share the information with the nursing team effectively for proper intervention. Moreover, the ability to share crucial information with the family members is an important skill of the case manager for the appropriate handling of the patient by his family members. This way, the patient be helped in erasing the suicidal thought and live his remaining days peacefully.
In conclusion, a clinical ethical dilemma is common in most health facilities and should be handled with care to avoid conflicts. Clinical conflicts often arise when there is inappropriate communication within the facility. When proper communication skills are developed, management case can be done effectively with optimum sense. Therefore, all the categories of health care professionals and those who are involved in the patients are needed to learn, develop, and practice the communication skills for proper handling of conflict in case it arises.
References
Milliken, A. (2018). Ethical awareness: What it is and why it matters. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 23 (1). doi: 10.3912/OJIN.Vol23No01Man01
Rasoal, D., Skovdahl, K., Gifford, M., & Kihlgren, A. (2017). Clinical ethics support for healthcare personnel: An integrative literature review. HEC Forum, 29 (4), 313–346. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-017-9325-4
