Ethical Issues In Nursing Accountability - Professional Ethics Verses Personal Ethics

Abstract

This paper would focus on the study of the ethical issues that are associated with the nursing profession. Since many years health professionals are being subjected to several ethical conflicts in the workplace. The ethical issues arise when the values of the professionals conflict with the perceptions of patients. Nurses are direct employees of hospitals, whereas most physicians are not. Because of this difference in employment, nurses may view the organization as responsible for monitoring other nurses, and therefore experience ethical conflict with the organization if administration does not deal with breaches in the professional conduct of other nurses. In our study, however, nurses reported conflict not only with physicians but also with other health care providers. This may reflect the evolving nature of inter-professional teams and the complexities of collaboration across health disciplines.

Ethical Issues In Nursing Accountability - Professional Ethics Verses Personal Ethics

Introduction

Since many years health professionals are being subjected to several ethical conflicts in the workplace. The ethical issues arise when the values of the professionals conflict with the perceptions of patients (Sorta-Bilajac, Bazdaric, Brozovic, Agich, 2008). Recent trends in health care have created the potential for high levels of ethical conflict, especially for physicians and nurses, who are key partners in the provision of quality ethical care (Davies, Edwards, Ploeg, Virani, 2008). The rise of the ethical issues in health care was observed in the 1990s due to the lack of human resource. Due to the scarcity of quality HR the professionals were not able to provide the services according to the expectations of the patients (Lin, Liang, 2007).

Increases in the expectations of public and health professionals for high quality health care cause a further strain on limited resources. At the same time that funding has become an issue, technological and pharmacological advances provide new but expensive treatment options, which often lead to questions about the ethics of how, when, and for whom these new treatments should be used (Mezey, Fulmer, Abraham, 2006).

Typically, researchers have focused on the clinical ethical conflicts of nurses, and have not considered which conflicts may be shared by persons from both professions, or which may be specific to one professional group. Only a few studies have directly compared and contrasted the ethical conflicts experienced by nurses and physicians who work across varied clinical practice settings in hospitals (Roche, Duffield, 2007). Given the ubiquitous nature of ethical dilemmas in all areas of clinical practice today, our study contributes to the literature on clinical ethical conflict by identifying themes that cut across specialty areas, and by comparing themes identified by nurses with those identified by physicians (Lin, Liang, 2007).

Discussion and Analysis

Helen Erickson Ideology

According to Helen Erickson recent decades it has imposed a growing interest in complex ethical issues that arise in the practice of medicine. But the dilemmas in this area are not new. The moral and human dimension of medical practice has been recognized since the V century BC when a group ...