Essay Sample on Health Advocacy Campaign

Introduction

Advocacy is one of the significant pillars of nursing. Mostly, nursing professionals fight for the profession, patients, and causes of various diseases. Driven by moral and ethical principles, advocacy shapes healthcare policies and improves the welfare of nurses, the nursing profession, and healthcare. Therefore, this paper describes ethical dilemmas that are likely to emerge during advocacy campaigns and their possible solutions, as well as, ethical laws and reporting requirements pertinent to the campaign. It also evaluates distinct ethical challenges unique to the population being addressed.

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Ethical Dilemmas and Their Solutions

Ethical dilemmas are likely to arise when some parents of school children decline to support the national school lunch program due to several reasons. Some may view the program as a direct target to their children while others may perceive it as discrimination against obese children. Despite such resistance, nurses should not accept the decisions of those parents because they truly know that the program is beneficial to overweight children and their parents. Nonetheless, when advocating for the rights of patients, American Nurses Association (ANA) nursing code of ethics stresses that nurses must remain devoted to participants, respect and honor their autonomy and rights always (American Nurses Association, 2010). Regarding participants, the major ethical dilemma is likely to occur when records are submitted to the court. Therefore, confidentiality and privacy must be respect in such situations. To solve this ethical challenge, full information about the program and assessment techniques will be disclosed to participants to enable them to understand and give informed consent.

Ethical dilemmas may also arise while evaluating the effectiveness of the national lunch program. The dilemmas may include role conflict, objective assessment of the program, and reporting harmful impacts. Role conflict dilemma is likely to arise when stakeholders gain personal attachment to the program and become bias. It may also occur when stakeholders assume the responsibilities of the evaluator and administrator. To solve this challenge, stakeholders will conduct an accurate, objective, and impartial evaluation using a proper evaluation process. They will also consider various views of people who will participate in the program. Further, they will be transparent and honest while describing multiple aspects of the program that have not succeeded and established the best approach to make them succeed or terminate the whole program when adverse effects surpass the benefits. Solving the above ethical challenge also entails maintaining effective communication while implementing the program and having a well-documented contract that will bind the program, evaluators, and all stakeholders. Perryman and Sidoti (2015) also noted that evaluators must clearly understand their weaknesses and strengths as this will assist them to avoid assessing programs that they are likely to show a high level of biasness.

Applicable Ethics and Lobbying Laws

All nurses have ethical rights to safeguard patients from harm and to minimize health inequalities (Perryman & Sidoti, 2015). It is the responsibility of nurses to look for ways of making people healthy. The primary ethical and lobbying law appropriate for the national school lunch program is the conflict of interest. Conflict of interest implies that legislators cannot use their positions to benefit from the program. Secondly, in various cities including Nashville Tennessee, the revolving door ban restricts government officers from taking over the roles of lobbyists for a year once they vacate their offices. It is also a requirement for all the lobbyists to register and report their activities to enable the center for ethics to follow up their relationship with legislators closely.

Special Ethical Challenges

The ethical challenges may potentially arise about intervention strategies and approaches for childhood obesity. Some of these challenges include; uncertainty of the impacts of the proposed interventions on physical health. Further, there are detrimental psychosocial effects including fears, uncertainty, concerns, unjust discrimination, as well as, blaming and stigmatization. Moreover, insufficient information is conveyed, the cultural and social value of eating is ignored, confidentiality and privacy of people are violated, and the intricacy of responsibilities concerning overweight is overlooked. Similarly, interventions for the disease violate children's personal lifestyle choices and parents' preferred means of raising their children. It also breaks the policy choices of schools on how to handle students. In a nutshell, childhood obesity is an important issue and therefore interventions strategies and approaches aimed at preventing it can easily become an ethical issue.

Summary

Obesity is a significant health problem across the world. Numerous campaigns have been started to reduce it, but more weight should be put on addressing childhood obesity. Lawmakers should be more active in enacting laws that command schools to serve healthy and affordable meals for all learners. The rules should also ensure that every school across the country makes a physical activity compulsory for learners irrespective of their ages. No student should be excused from physical activity. In case obesity can be reduced at a tender age, its prevalence and its related disorders such as kidney and heart disorders will be minimized as well. To reduce the disease, everyone should be informed about its causes, effects, as well as, prevention and management approaches. Moreover, eating healthily and engaging in physical activity will help reduce the disorder because it will lower the possibilities of consuming processed or fast food meals rich in saturated fats. Getting lobbyist will benefit the school lunch program and inform parents and students about healthy habits. However, one should note morals and ethics that either support or object the campaign will always occur, and therefore appropriate mechanism should be put in place to deal with them. I will continue to push forward to ensure that learning institutions across the US introduce lunch programs and increase physical activity for students of all ages.

References

American Nurses Association. (2010). Code of ethics for nurses. Washington, DC: Author.

Perryman, M., & Sidoti, K. (2015). Ethical considerations in the treatment of childhood obesity. Medicolegal and Bioethics, 5, 17-26. doi:10.2147/mb.s63710