Essay Example on Ethics in Healthcare: Principles and Challenges for Healthcare Professionals

Introduction

In the healthcare environment of the interviewee, ethics plays a significant role in guiding healthcare professionals' decision-making processes. Mainly, it focuses on the ethical challenges and issues that arise in the healthcare facility. During the interview, the nurse defined ethics as a set of moral values and principles that guide the behavior of healthcare professionals within the healthcare environment. To the nurse, a decision or an act that is ethical is both morally and acceptable to society. Further, he defined an ethical challenge as a situation that is accompanied by a disturbing or uncomfortable emotional response. Often, healthcare professionals are faced by situations that need a considerable amount of fact-finding and discussion to simply pinpoint the issue facing them. According to the interviewee, frequently, an issue reaches the level of ethical dilemma where there is no good answer.

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Based on the interview, it is clear that healthcare professionals face many ethical challenges. Moreover, many aspects such as culture, upbringing, religion, and individual beliefs and values affect ethical considerations (Sellevold, Egede-Nissen, Jakobsen, & Sorlie, 2019). These elements shape people's ethical views and influence ethical decisions that affect healthcare professionals, patients, and their families. Some of the common ethical challenges that the interviewee encounters in the workplace include pro-choice versus pro-life, quality versus quantity of life, truth versus deception, and personal beliefs versus empirical knowledge. During the interview, the interviewee gave the following case scenario of an ethical challenge that intensive care unit nurses often face. As a nurse, one may be caring for a patient with a terminal illness. The patient's plan of care comprises of endless painful procedures and treatments that seem futile. In such a situation, the nurse may view following the plan of care as an ethical responsibility to use every method that may possibly cure the patient. Similarly, the health facility where the patient is admitted may have a professional interest in the result of prolonging life or research interest in the treatment plan. The patient's family may feel a responsibility to prolong the patient's life. However, the patient's perspective, probably to end his or her life, is drowned out by all these conflicting perspectives.

In some cases, the nurse's ethical responsibility is clear since he is obliged to advocate for the patient (Runciman, Merry & Walton, 2017). Nevertheless, sometimes, the patient may be unsure of what he or she wants. In other situations, the patient may be misinformed, and educating him or her without persuading to one's perspective as a nurse or disrespecting his or her cultural beliefs and values may be challenging. In other instances, the nurse may be compelled to advocate for the patient in opposition with the patient's family or healthcare provider's views, although this may have some consequences such as disciplinary action or loss of a job. Undeniably, such a situation is challenging to the nurse, and it calls for assistance from the hospital's ethics mechanism.

The interviewee gave another example of an ethics challenge he had faced while working in pediatrics. The issue involved the treatment of a ten-year-old child and the nurse had to determine whether the patient understood his medical situation. The nurse determined that the patient could not give informed consent. Hence, the responsibility fell to the patient's legal guardian. However, because of the shock resulting from the child's sudden illness, the Guardian seemed confused and anxious, which complicated the situation further. Furthermore, her anxiousness was evidence that she was not in the right state of mind to make such a crucial decision concerning the patient. Therefore, the nurse had to seek help from the head nurse to ensure he acted ethically in the situation.

Handling Ethical Challenges

During the interview, the interviewee pointed out that handling ethical challenge within his healthcare environment is a joint effort. Moreover, caring for a patient involves the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team of professionals. In particular, at the unit level, the interviewee finds it helpful to convene unit-based debriefing sessions in which all professions discuss specific patient situations. During these sessions, the interviewee and his colleagues experience and express their concerns, build consensus plans of care, and develop educational programs on ethical topics.

In addition, the interviewee included the issue of cultural competence in handling ethical challenges within his work environment. In particular, he pointed out that he works with culturally diverse colleagues, patients, and families. As previously stated, culture is a major factor that affects ethical considerations (Sellevold et al., 2019). Thus, the interviewee actively seeks cultural competence, understands and respects colleagues, patients, and families' attitudes and values, and pursues awareness of his cultural views and biases. Similarly, he supports patients' cultural networks and makes appropriate referrals when he lacks cultural competence. Such cultural competence enables him to develop ethical courses of action in every situation.

Further, the interviewee pointed out that following the set nurses' codes of ethics helps him handle the ethical challenges that arise within the work environment. The codes ethics identifies what health professionals should expect of each other within the healthcare setting and what the public should anticipate from the healthcare profession (Epstein & Turner, 2015). In addition, the codes of ethics indicate that the nurses' primary responsibility is to the patient. Likewise, in the interest of patient safety, the codes of ethics demand that a healthcare professional has a duty to report what they observe especially actions that places patient safety at risk (Epstein & Turner, 2015). According to the interviewee, following these codes of conducts provide a pathway through which to solve ethical dilemmas and challenges within the hospital.

Comparison of Interviewee's Answers with Course Material

The Interviewee's answers align with the course material. First, the interviewee agrees with the material that healthcare professionals must meet the ethical responsibilities of promoting health, preventing harm, and treating individuals equally with respect to the uniqueness and dignity of each person. In addition, the definitions of ethics and ethical challenges align with those in the course material. Likewise, the ethical challenges he identifies are similar to those discusses in the course material.

Likewise, where healthcare ethics information has always addressed the ethical challenges that health professionals face in their work environments, the focus has been on collaborative decision-making, good judgment, and professional and personal accountability (Runciman, Merry & Walton, 2017). All these aspects are evident in the interviewee's answers. For example, he pointed out the use of interdisciplinary collaboration while solving ethical challenges within the hospital. Such collaboration is essential to the safety and quality of care given to patients.

Similarly, the interviewee's answer the compliance with the nurses' codes of ethics while handling ethical challenges aligns with the course materials. Generally, the code of ethics for healthcare professions identify the responsibility of practitioners to place the patient's interests first, promoting patients' health, safety, and rights, protect the autonomy and dignity of the patient, and maintain confidentiality. In addition, their responsibility is to practice with honesty and integrity, maintain competence, respect others, and practice in a non-discriminatory manner.

Further, during the interview, the interviewee mentioned the use of ethics mechanisms to assist healthcare professionals in handling ethical challenges. Notably, hospitals need to have an ethics mechanism, which helps healthcare professionals deal with ethical challenges. Such a mechanism can be an ethics committee comprising of consultants, healthcare managers, and head nurses with additional ethics training who assist healthcare professionals, patients, and families to solve ethical dilemmas (Runciman, Merry & Walton, 2017). The interdisciplinary teams within such committees exercise their role through policy, case consultation, and education (Runciman, Merry & Walton, 2017). They review difficult ethical challenges and make recommendations on the various alternative course of action that healthcare professionals can take.

Conclusion

To conclude, the application of ethics in the healthcare environment is crucial in guiding the healthcare professionals' decision-making processes relating to patient care. In particular, it helps them meet their ethical responsibilities of promoting health, preventing harm, and treating individuals equally with respect to the uniqueness and dignity of each person.

References

Epstein, B., & Turner, M. (2015). The nursing code of ethics: Its value, its history. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 20(2), 1-10. http://dx.doi.org10.3912/OJIN.Vol20No02Man04

Runciman, B., Merry, A., & Walton, M. (2017). Safety and ethics in healthcare: a guide to getting it right. CRC Press.

Sellevold, G. S., Egede-Nissen, V., Jakobsen, R., & Sorlie, V. (2019). Quality dementia care: Prerequisites and relational ethics among multicultural healthcare providers. Nursing ethics, 26(2), 504-514. http://dx.doi.org10.1177/0969733017712080