Description
Nurses face ethical situations every day. Currently, the ANA has a list of ethics resources pertaining to the following topics:
https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/nursi…
Social justice
Moral courage, distress, and resilience
End-of-life issues
Caregiving
- Bioethics
- Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:
- Think about ethical situations you have experienced in practice.
- Write a summary of your experiences and explain how the situations were resolved or ended.
POST 1
Hi there. Here is ONE response post to the faculty. 175 words.More Discussion – Nurses Angry & FrustratedWhat personal values and ethical principles would apply to this situation that was shared with me by a NICU nurse? You might consider paternalism (making decisions for the patient) vs non-maleficence (doing no harm).We had an infant born at 23 weeks to a mother with known substance abuse and no prenatal care. This infant was resuscitated at birth at the mother’s request and placed on life support. The parents did not visit this baby for the majority of the time the infant was in the NICU. The infant required many painful lifesaving measures to sustain his life. Eventually the MRI scans of his brain documented the severity of damage his brain had and that if he lived his quality of life was poor. He would have to live on life support, never walk, talk, eat or speak. The grandmother was the only visitor for a long time. Weeks later the mother finally admitted that the infant’s father was incarcerated. We had to address the court system to allow the father to visit the infant before any decisions were made. The nurses in our NICU cared for and loved this child as though he was our own. Many of us were angry and frustrated when the mom did come for her twenty-minute visit. She didn’t change his diaper or ask to hold him. One day she asked if a priest could come to baptize or bless him. The priest came within the twenty minutes of the call, but the mother left her infant’s bedside and it was the nurses who stayed with the infant for the blessing. After four long painful months, this infant was finally taken off life support and was held by his nurse until he passed.
POST 2
Here is the SECOND response post to a classmate. Thanks!End of life issues are something I dealt with a lot, especially with this last surge of Covid. I feel that a lot of nurses are afraid to talk to patients and their families about palliative measures, and we do have palliative physicians available, but they sometimes are not able to see the patient right away. One particular situation comes to mind, I had a patient that was previously in the ICU and intubated due to Covid pneumonia and was requiring continuous Bipap. The patient had spoken to me about no longer wanting to wear the bipap as it was very uncomfortable, and that he was ready to die, but didn’t know how to tell his family. We did not have palliative care available at that time, so I sat down with the patient and the family and we talked about the patient’s wishes and how he felt that he was done, but he also felt like he was “giving up” and that he was a burden to his children. In this instance, it would have been easier had the patient had Advance Directives in place. According to the ANA, “Advance directives are a means to allow people to convey their wishes for end of life care” (ANA, 2022). It is always best to figure out what your wishes are when you are healthy, and let your family know what you want when the time comes that you cannot speak for yourself. This will also allow the family to not feel the burden of trying to make a decision about end of life care, and wondering if that is what they would want or not.
