NURS 521 Essays Ethics in Healthcare

Nursing and Health Care Ethics explores the work of nurse scholars in ethics, and creatively looks back to assess previous accomplishments and forward to find new directions and strengthen future scholarly contributions in nursing ethics. The content of each class is focused on weekly critical thinking discussion groups based on the reading assignment which gives the student an opportunity to examine and evaluate information regarding the unique contributions of nurses to ethics and health care. Critical thinking activities, organized by the book’s themes are examples of applying these scholarly insights into practice.

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