Introduction
Nurses take care of people’s aspects of private and personal lives. Nursing care is drastically changing because of advanced medical and technological development and the increased concentration on the logic and standardization of production, allowing hospitals’ cultures of modern days. It is based on a holistic approach with the ethical responsibility to respect and maintain the integrity and dignity of an individual. The essay critically evaluates ethical dilemmas in nursing practice by defining an ethical dilemma and its effects. In addition, the essay explains the relationship between moral issues, bioethical principles, personal morality, and values, as well as the morality of a society.
Ethical Dilemma Definition
The necessity to choose between more than two acceptable morals from available options or from a variety of options in situations where making a judgment is difficult to rely on is known as an ethical dilemma. Multiple aspects lead to the consistent and complex incidence of moral concerns in healthcare. These emerge in some patients are self-determined, rapid increase in economic stress, and medical advancement (Aldolaim, 2021). For instance, for a patient with cancer geared towards the end of life, an ethical dilemma comprises the tasks of conveying the truth, artificial nutrition and hydration, and misconceptions over management plans.
Additionally, patients need to be provided with opportunities to express their freedom of choice when seeking their preferred healthcare services. It is recommended that ethical nurses identify their duty towards guaranteeing that they offer professional care to patients and ensure that they meet patients’ satisfaction as anticipated (Asare et al., 2022). In the National League for Nursing (NLN), patients’ rights are well highlighted.
The Effects of Ethical Dilemma on Nursing
Nurses encounter sophisticated ethical problems, for example, when a parent declines to vaccinate a child. Mr. Black is the sole guardian and father to a 4-year-old boy preparing to begin kindergarten (Asare et al., 2022). The father has never allowed his child to be vaccinated and claims that compelling him to have his child get vaccinated violates his and his child’s rights. The ethical dilemma is in the interest of protecting the health of the population and communities, the healthcare sector advocates for vaccination against preventable illnesses. Nurses can feel caught between being proactive concerning vaccines and the right of a parent to decide which healing to accept.
The solution to this ethical issue is that it is not a nurse’s job to withhold or enforce the administration of a vaccine. However, the work of a nurse is to offer enough education to the father to make a well-informed decision about vaccine safety and any possible risks (Haahr et al., 2019). If the parent declines to vaccinate the child, the nurse must have the parent sign a declination form and record any awareness given to the child’s parent.
The Main Moral Issues Raised in the Circumstance
Their daily moral issues often stress nurses, which they experience in their work, although it demands minimal focus on their consideration. Moral issues typically dissatisfy them because they dispense with their daily tasks. Currently, the environment for nurses calls for them to resolve the staff shortage issue while practicing the multifaceted standard. The fundamental ethical questions of wrongness or rightness underlying the decision of beneficent care of a patient contribute to moral issues in healthcare circumstances (Haahr et al., 2019). For instance, nurses in critical care often experience suffering directly and could question the balance between the values of trying to preserve the life of a patient and forceful physiological measures that seem to extend anguish and produce no fruitful results.
Bioethical Principles as They Associate with the Ethical Dilemmas
Principle of Autonomy
In nursing practice, autonomy is typically articulated as the right of knowledgeable adults to make well-informed resolutions concerning their medical care. It means that patients have the right to decide between various medical treatment alternatives considering benefits, risks, values, and personal situations (Shanker et al., 2019). It is properly diagnosed in therapeutic exercise, ethics, and law. People suffering from chronic diseases have no longer been spotted as terminal life illnesses (Macioce, 2018). One has a proper right over the objections of their doctors and the healthcare facility to have existing assistance devices disconnected regardless of the truth that withdrawing the gadget can hasten their demise.
Principle of Beneficence
The principle states that a doctor must act for the patient’s benefit and supports several moral rules to defend and protect the rights of others, remove conditions that can cause harm, prevent harm, rescue people in danger, and assist people with disabilities. Beneficence is transformed into actualized through the process of a patient going to a physician for examination and inquiry, in which the doctor gives advice (Macioce, 2018). It assures that healthcare professionals like nurses regard personal situations and consider that what works for one patient cannot necessarily imply great for another one.
Value of One’s Morality
A few ethical standards are established to govern how nurses deal with their patients. Societal moralities comprise requirements such as identifying the moral sense of other people because one prefers them to acknowledge their judgment of wrong and right and not trample on others. The policies contribute to laws geared towards murder, assaults, robbery, and fraud, and approximately anybody supports the requirements (Peterson et al., 2021). However, the worst dissenters agreed to a certain extent with Adolf Hitler’s concept of being incorrect to kill or steal one asset.
Values Relationship with the Morality of a Society
The case of Dr. Kevorkian is important for scientific ethics study as no research can be credited without quotes from the case due to its summaries on healthcare experts who facilitated suicide. The physician supported the death cases where the doctors assisted patients in carrying out suicide, although the affected persons could actualize the activity. Euthanasia refers to the activity of letting patients take their lives upon their appeal with the assistance of a physician (Raho & Miccinesi, 2021). It has led to limitations on the principle of beneficence, with people asking themselves, do the physicians have the right to take the lives of patients?
In examining this aspect, there is a need to adopt the concept of double effect in nursing (Aldolaim, 2021). At first, the activity itself should be morally similar, and then the person should be willing to commit suicide. The third is that the severe impact cannot be administered to a sound effect, and lastly, there has to be a balance between terrible and good outcomes. Nonetheless, in the current society, killing cannot be associated with moral rights (Ziegler et al., 2018). While people used to apply for therapeutic medicine without validation, the profession was compromised because Dr. Kevorkian, a licensed physician, declined to follow the ethical codes of standards based on his practice.
Conclusion
An ethical dilemma is the need to choose more than two appropriate morals from the given options. It implies that a nurse would be doing something wrong and right concurrently; hence, one right leads to the negation of another right course. Ethical care in nursing practice should be based on well-informed decision-making and rational science. Therefore, nurses are obliged to adhere to the four fundamental principles of nursing practice, namely, the principles of autonomy, beneficence, justice, and non-malfeasance.
References
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Shanker, R. R., Underhill, A., Nicholson, V., Kennedy, L., Jaworsky, D., & Loutfy, M. (2019). Ethical issues in the care and support of women living with HIV. Ethical Issues in Women’s Healthcare, 3(5), 107-128. Web.
Ziegler, S., Schmid, M., Bopp, M., Bosshard, G., & Puhan, M. A. (2018). Continuous deep sedation until death—a Swiss death certificate study. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 33(7), 1052-1059. Web.
