The nursing profession has become recognized yet challenging over the past few years. Nurses play a significant role in promoting care among populations they serve. However, they sometimes face difficulty in making various decisions. Nurses face various ethical dilemmas in their work and the choices they make affect the quality of services they provide to patients.
Ethics play a significant role in the effect of nurses functions in patients’ daily lives. The futility of continued treatment and end-of-life care is one ethical issue in nursing (Kass, Lewis & Rubin, 2018). Nurses play a significant role in the patients’ quality of life in deciding whether to continue providing them with treatment that will only strain them and their families. Another ethical issue is non-judgmental interactions with patients when administering services to them. If the patient feels like the nurse judges them, they may not be in a position to express themselves; hence preventing them from obtaining high-quality healthcare services.
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Vulnerable populations refer to a group or groups of individuals who differ from others based on various issues such as sexuality, race, color, social and economic background, age, and other factors. Nurses must address multiple ethical issues in the delivery of services when advocating for this group of people who are susceptible to discrimination (Ten Have, 2016). One problem is that there may arise an ethical dilemma because of a patient’s inability to pay for care or acquire essential medications (Ten Have, 2016). The nurses will face a moral dilemma of denying them medication that their insurance plan may not cover. Secondly, a patient may have issues with their immigration status, and a nurse may be tempted to call a law enforcement agency. However, they must remember that their first obligation is to the patient. Third, transgender patients must have access to nonjudgmental healthcare services and care. Nurses should uphold equality and deliver high-quality services to customers despite their situations.
In conclusion, nurses’ decisions significantly affect patients’ care. From time to time, nurses experience the challenge of having to decide on what is morally wrong and right during the administration of healthcare services. When dealing with vulnerable populations, they must treat them equally and provide high-quality services. Therefore, the first obligation of nurses is to provide care to patients and their decisions determine the outcome of healthcare delivery.
References
Kass, J. S., Lewis, A., & Rubin, M. A. (2018). Ethical Considerations in End-of-life Care in the
Face of Clinical Futility. Continuum: Lifelong Learning in Neurology , 24 (6), 1789-1793.
Ten Have, H. (2016). Vulnerability: challenging bioethics . Routledge.
