NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare
NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare
Week 1 Discussion Forum in NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare
Discussion Prompt #1
Reflect upon the survey you took. In your initial response, address some of the following questions. Explain your answers.
Did you find it easy to make confident and decisive decisions with several strongly agree or strongly disagree answers, or did you select mostly moderate responses?
Did any subject areas trigger personal emotions or issues? If so, do you feel you were able to remain objective?
Were any of the decisions especially difficult to make?
Did you employ any critical thinking or resolution strategies to determine a response?
Did you rely on policy or legal parameters to make your decisions?
Would you be comfortable making your answers to the survey public, or do you prefer anonymity?
Have you dealt with similar situations and could you perceive similar situations occurring in your clinical practice?
How might a moral inventory such as this survey impact your clinical practice?
Please share additional thoughts as well.
Discussion Prompt #2
Identify examples of active and latent errors. Provide examples from your clinical experience, if possible. How can such errors be avoided to support better patient care?
Week 2 discussion on NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare
Discussion Prompt #1
Explain the statement, “What may be an ethical dilemma for one registered nurse may not be an ethical dilemma for another registered nurse.” Be sure to define an ethical dilemma in the course of your discussion. Describe a challenging situation in your nursing career that required you to consider the ethical dimensions of the patient case and the role you played in providing care. (Be sure to respect and maintain patient and colleague confidentiality.)
Discussion Prompt #2
Apply the framework of The Five R’s approach to ethical nursing practice from this week’s reading to answer the questions about values and choices.
What are values?
Q. What are your personal values?
Q. Why do you value them?
Q. What are the values in your society?
Q. How do you make choices?
Q. Are your choices based on your values?
Q. What values are useful in society?
What are the limits to personal choice?
Q. Who limits your choices?
Q. Are limits to choices good?
Q. Do you limit other people’s choices?
Q. Should the health care organization or the government limit people’s choices? If so, how, and under what circumstances?
In your responses to peers, feel free to agree, disagree, question, compare, and discuss each other’s responses in a way that fosters thoughtful and respectful dialog. You may also address the following: Did any responses surprise you? If so, how? Did reading your peers’ responses to the questions expand your own view of ways to answer questions?
Finally, consider this: A common idea in health care is that if you are drawn to health care as a profession, you are inherently guided by an inner compass that is composed of a strong moral framework. Why is this a dangerous assumption?
NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare Assignment Papers – Week 3 discussion
Discussion Prompt #1
Discuss the potential controversy when considering a patient’s right to know whether a caregiver has AIDS, and the caregiver’s right to privacy and confidentiality. Consider the following: A physician cut his hand with a scalpel while he was assisting another physician. Because of the uncertainty that blood had been transferred from the physician’s hand wound to the patient through an open surgical incision, he agreed to have a blood test for HIV. His blood tested positive for HIV and he withdrew himself from participation in further surgical procedures. Discuss the ethical and legal issues.
Discussion Prompt #2
The following questions refer to your experience in this week’s exercise, Conducting Moral and Ethical Dialog in Clinical Practice. Describe your overall experience with the moral and ethical dialog exercise, and address at least three (3) of the following:
Did you find any of the scenarios more difficult to deal with than others?
Did you feel any internal conflict with any of the scenarios?
How did your personal and professional background impact how you decided to interact with the patient?
Do you feel the responses the patient gave to the practitioner’s response were reasonable or typical?
Were you taken aback by any of the patient reactions?
How might this activity contribute to your role as a nurse advocate in a moral and ethical practice?
Did you utilize an ethical decision making model to explore a systematic way to evaluate any of these ethical dilemmas? If so, describe the effectiveness.
NURS 521 Ethics in Healthcare Essay Assignment Papers – Week 4 discussion
Discussion Prompt #1
Apply the differences between negligence and malpractice to the practice of nursing. Provide examples to illustrate your points.
Discussion Prompt #2
Read the following article and view the video on the same case. How can this example be used as an illustration of maintaining patient safety and providing safe, effective care? Identify some of the possible barriers that nurses face when acting on what they believe to be the morally correct action in this particular case.
Patient Safety Advocate Carole Hemmelgarn
NURS521 Ethics in Healthcare Essay Assignment Papers – Week 5 discussion
Discussion Prompt #1
Specifically define the role of the registered nurse in patient advocacy. Describe situations in which nursing advocacy can assist patients within the healthcare environment. Defend why nurses are, or are not, adequately prepared, in prelicensure education, to act as patient advocates.
Discussion Prompt #2
The ANA Code of Ethics currently emphasizes the word “patient” instead of the word “client” in referring to nursing care recipients. Do you agree with this change? Why or why not? Review the ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements found in Appendix B of your Butts text.
Week 6 discussion on NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare
Discussion Prompt #1
Identify two issues that a nurse might bring to an institutional ethics committee. Describe why the nurse should bring these issues to the ethics committee. Elaborate on how a nurse should prepare to present one of the issues to the ethics committee.
Discussion Prompt #2
Betty, the chief nursing officer, had to make a decision about buying 120 new hospital beds for patient rooms. After she interviewed nurse mangers at the units where the beds were going to be placed, Betty compiled her findings and decided to contact a well-known equipment company to obtain prices and contracts.
The equipment company’s executive salesperson, Jim, discussed options at length with her and invited her and her significant other to an upcoming all-expenses-paid lavish retreat at a five-star hotel in Hawaii to see demonstrations of the beds and to hear a comprehensive sales pitch. Betty thought to herself, “We badly need some relaxation and stress relief. Hawaii would be so much fun. Would it be wrong for us to go?”
If you were Betty, what would you do? Give your rationale. Justify your answer with an ethical framework—a theory, approach, or principle.
Do you consider this situation a conflict of interest? Why or why not? Give your rationale.
What policies, if any, should be in place regarding a scenario such as this one? Do you have any such policies in place at work for similar situations? Do such policies impact day-to-day activities in any way? Explain.