Question 1
A clinician in an outpatient hospital had been offering treatment in the morning hours, and always completes the documentation during the lunch hour. She sat in the gym area writing notes since there was no desk space that she could utilize at that moment. She left the notes on the treatment table and joined a colleague (a physical therapist) who requested to be assisted in an evaluation of another patient's report. She then returned to pick the notes and found another patient reading them at the table. This scenario is a breach of ethics that I witnessed.
Confidentiality of information was the ethical principle that the clinician breached. The health information of patients is confidential and cannot be shared with unauthorized persons without their permission. Such a breach of information can amount to a lawsuit against the nurse or the facility. The medical facility has a duty to safeguard a patient’s confidential medical information, particularly when the risks of this breach are reasonably predictable and can be prevented (Grace & DRN, 2017). However, in this scenario, the patient did not discover that an unauthorized person had read his information. The nurse should have been diligent to maintain the confidentially of the patient’s records by not exposing it on the desk.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Question 2
A physician had been treating a patient for many months when I noticed an ethical issue that I was not sure of what to do. After some time, the patient and physician started a friendly relationship that many of his colleagues noticed. The patient and physician could have long conversations during the therapy visits. It reached a time that the patient asked the physician out on a date, which he honored.
The facility’s director summoned the physician for a meeting to resolve this issue. He was found to have broken an ethical professional code to which he received a warning (Aliyu, Adeleke, & Omoniyi, 2015). He lost the chance of promotion to be a senior staff in the facility because of this scenario. The physician was then asked to call off the relationship with the patient and let her know that anything beyond a friendship was against the professional ethics.
References
Aliyu, D., Adeleke, I. T., & Omoniyi, S. O. (2015). Knowledge, attitude and practice of nursing ethics and law among nurses at Federal Medical Centre, Bida. American Journal of Health Research , 3 (1-1), 32-37.
Grace, P. J., & DRN, P. (Eds.). (2017). Nursing ethics and professional responsibility in advanced practice . Jones & Bartlett Learning.
