Ethics is usually concerned with values that need respect from all healthcare service providers. The psychiatric unit is a common area in which ethical issues are encountered. Recently, I encountered an ethical issue on confidentiality between a patient and a medical service provider. A schizophrenia patient had been admitted at the Psychiatric unit for nearly a week. One day, as the nurse responsible for administering medication to the patient, was performing her duties, the patient got up and whispered to the nurse that she was pregnant and needed to terminate the pregnancy without the knowledge of her husband. The reason why she wanted to terminate the pregnancy is that one day, as she was walking from the market center at around 9 pm, she got raped, and due to her condition, she was unable to raise any voice.
However, the ethical issue, in this case, arises in the case where the nurse went ahead and informed the patient's husband about the situation. In this case, the patient's confidentiality right was violated. As a result, this meant that the principle of truthfulness and confidentiality had been violated (Schroder-Back et al., 2014). The patient was truthful enough to tell the nurse of her situation, but the nurse could not keep it confidential as she went out and contacted the patient’s husband about the situation. In this case, despite the patient having a mental disorder, it should have been the responsibility of the nurse not to disclose this information.
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However, several measures have been put in place to ensure that confidentiality is achieved. The first thing is that once a patient is in hospital on his/her own, no information shall ever be disclosed to his/her family apart from only how the patient is progressing. Medical providers, in this case, will not be allowed to make contact with a patient's family unless it is a general issue (Jain et al., 2017). Also, I have created awareness among staff members to ensure they do not record information of patients fully in written documents. This should be a measure that would aid in preventing outside persons from understanding the private matters of a patient.
References
Jain, S., Kuppili, P. P., Pattanayak, R. D., & Sagar, R. (2017). Ethics in Psychiatric Research: Issues and Recommendations. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine , 558-565.
Schroder-Back, P., Duncan, P., Sherlaw, W., Brall, C., & Czabanowska, K. (2014). Teaching seven principles for public health ethics: towards a curriculum for a short course on ethics in public health programs. BMC Medical Ethics , 15-73.
