Essay Sample on ANA: A Lifeline for Nurses & Healthcare Providers Dealing with Ethical Dilemmas

Introduction

Nurses and other health care providers experience many ethical issues during the delivery of health care every day. The American Nurses Association (ANA) plays an important role in assisting the nurses deal with such ethical dilemmas by providing them with principles and standards that they should adhere to when reacting to ethical issues. Therefore, ANA is very important to how the nurses react to ethical dilemmas in their different healthcare settings. Without ANA, it would be difficult for nurses to react to ethical dilemmas, and they may be subject to making poor decisions because of the situation that they find themselves. In this paper, the significance of the ANA Code of Ethics to all professionals in the nursing practice. I will also discuss one provision of the ANA Code of Ethics and how it will be of significance to my nursing practice.

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Significance of the ANA Code of Ethics

The importance of the ANA Code of Ethics cannot be underestimated for the last eighteen years. According to research, the ANA Code of Ethics has been the best ethical profession because of its honesty and helping the nursing practice as much as they can (Peterson & Potter, 2014). Nurses are always faced with many ethical issues in the nursing practices that usually test their trustworthy, ability to make decisions and the compassion they have for their practice. Some of the ethical issues that face nurses every day include working for long hours because of the shortage of enough nurses in some health organizations, ending the life of critically sick patients, and providing expensive medical services to patients who cannot meet the medical bills such as the heart transplant. Nurses play an important role in the recovery of patients, and therefore, they should not be left alone, especially when facing major ethical dilemmas (American Nurses Association, 2015). Many organizations have come to their help when it comes to dealing with different issues. However, no organization has been as helpful to the nursing practice as an American Nurse Association. Since1950s, the organization has been making many changes to its principles and standards to address many new ethical changes that nurses continue to experience every day (ANA, 2015). As a result, the ANA Code of Ethics has been fulfilling its main objective of providing guidelines that all nurses in the US are supposed to follow in all their profession decisions. The association currently has nine provisions with interpretive statements that help the nurses to understand which provision would most apply to their nursing practice.

Almost all the provisions provided can be useful to nurses regardless of what they do. This because the ANA Code of Ethics provides direction to nurses of what they are supposed to react to various ethical dilemmas in the nursing practice. All the provisions are just as important, and therefore, they are all important for every nurse to understand. However, all these provisions do not fit all nursing practices, and thus, nurses need to understand the provision that would most be relevant to their nursing practice (Peterson & Potter, 2014). In my case, the most relevant provision for my nursing practice is provision 3.

Provision 3

The third provision of the ANA Code of Ethics deals with nurses' obligation of safeguarding patients' health records, rights, and most importantly ensuring the safety of the patients. A nurse has the responsibility of understanding the privacy guidelines concerning the care of a patient and their identifiers (ANA, 2015). Any nurse with involvement in research needs to ensure they understand every aspect of being involved in the research. The aspect includes a must for the patient to have informed consent as well as disclosing fully every aspect that is required for the patient to take part in the research. It is also a must for the nurse to understand any standard set by the institution for reviewing of the nurse's performance. Such standards include the requirements of further studies or measures of progress. A person must be competent before qualifying to become a nurse (ANA, 2015). The competence must show itself in terms of both documentation and clinical prowess. The nurse must also be competent in any organization or institution where they may get employed (ANA, 2015). These aspects, standards, and competence requirements that a nurse must meet are essential to ensure the rights, safety and health of a patient are advocated for and promoted. In case a nurse has been witnessed or recognized to have questionable healthcare practices, they have to be reported to the relevant hands. Reporting the questionable practices, including misconducts or concerns that may put the patient's safety in jeopardy ensures proper measures are taken on the nurse. Nurses must also not attend to a patient when they are not sober (ANA, 2015). This could be resulting from taking substances, including medication on prescription or having abused drugs. Such substances may impair the nurse's thinking or action they are to take while caring for a patient. For a nurse to have impaired thinking or actions endangers the health of the patient and violates their right to get medical care from a competent nurse.

I believe that provision three is the most important to my nursing practice in that at times, nurses find them unable to protect the sensitive information of the patients. While in most cases, nurses try to ensure the safety of patients' healthcare information; sometimes, they are not able to due to their character or situation forces. Nurses can also find themselves leaving medical records carelessly or affording access to computers that contain patients’ health records. This doesn't seem right, and therefore, nurses need to ensure that every information about the patients of protected and safe from landing into the wrong hands (Peterson & Potter, 2014). Even if it is a family member, nurses should not reveal any health information about a patient without their consent. Many patients do not like their health information to reveal to anyone, whether close relative or friend. Therefore, nurses who reveal patients' health information are not only violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards and ANA ethical standards, but they are also offending the patients' values and principles.

The necessity of this provision can be explained by a case that occurred in the health record department, where I once worked for three years. A middle-aged man came requesting for the health record of her wife, who undergone HIV/AIDS test and turned to be positive. Although the man was established to be the ideal husband of the lady, the nurses refused to reveal any health information about the man's wife. I was surprised by the nurses' act, but after going through the provisions of the ANA, I now understand why the nurses rejected to provide any information to the man.

Conclusion

ANA Code of Ethics has been doing a great job in helping nurses deal with ethical dilemmas that face them every day. The association has provided nine provisions that all nurses need to adhere to depending on the nursing practice they are in. Nurses have no option but to adhere to the respective provisions in a case they are facing ethical dilemmas.

References

American Nurses Association (2015, May). Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements, Washington, D.C.: American Nurses Publishing. https://www.vcuhealth.org/for-health-professionals/nursing/about-nursing-at-vcu/ana-code-ethics

Peterson, M., & Potter, R. L. (2014). A proposal for a code of ethics for nurse practitioners. Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, 16(3), 116-124. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-7599.2004.tb00382.