Ethical and Legal Rules on Nursing Essay

Recently, ethical and legal rules on nursing have gained increasing prominence. As a result, it is essential to examine how legal and professional ethical standards affect nurses in the execution of their duties. Against this background, this essay uses various health initiatives to discuss nursing ethics as informed by legal processes relating to health information management, provision of health care, and patient rights.

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Nursing ethics concerns virtues and values that serve to advance the welfare of people and their respective rights to life and health rights. Health ethics also addresses the issues of the rightness and wrongness of specific developments in healthcare and the responsibility of the society of the society towards the health of its members. Moral norms and national laws influence the ethical concerns of healthcare.

A critical component of health ethics is respect for patient autonomy and informed consent. According to the Peter (2016), nurses must obtain informed consent from patients. Given the high amount of time involved in explaining health concepts to patients in nursing agency set-up, the need for informed consent may reduce the efficiency of a nurse in the provision of care services to the elderly. Nonetheless, the nurse should implement ethical decisions even if it means spending a lot of time explaining critical concepts to patients and their families.

Another ethical concept is confidentiality. The use of electronic medical records and health information systems contributes to the improvement of health equity. Concerning the security of the health information systems, health practitioners should ensure that the integrity of the system preserves patient health information and confidentiality. Email communications raise ethical and liability concerns associated with ethical and legal issues concerning consent and privacy.

Healthcare ethics and legal rules oblige nurses to follow the principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice. The principle of autonomy requires nurses to obtain valid informed consent from the participants. Autonomy requires a nurse to communicate with the patient. It is important to note that the principle of autonomy is not absolute. Therefore, a nurse should exercise discretion without violating the personal dignity of the study subject or patient (Hwang & Park, 2014). Secondly, the principle of beneficence requires the nurse to avoid harm. For instance, crisis communication should be conducted prudently to avert harm. In other words, a research study should protect and promote the welfare of patients. Another ethical issue is justice. Justice requires nurses to enhance inclusion. Therefore, nursing practices should extend care to patients drawn from different demographic groups irrespective of race, color, education, among other grounds for discrimination. Against the policy requirement for inclusion, nurses should not exploit socio-economic background to the detriment of the human subjects. Overall, nurses should ensure that they practice healthcare in line with national laws and moral principles.

One of the recent issues in health care revolves around the legality of administering mandatory flu vaccines on nurses in order to protect patients from nurses who may be infected with flu. Agency or providers may violate health ethics through the compulsory administration of flu vaccines. While hospitals may have the institutional liability of hospitals in connection to the enforcement of the mandatory vaccination against flu, there is a need to respect the autonomy of nurses (Lee, 2015). Nonetheless, justice requires nurses to obtain information on such vaccines to protect their patients.

By incorporating expert counsel from lawyers on current and anticipated legal development in health care, agency or providers can leverage legal advice keep abreast of legal and policy development that affect the practice of health care and delivery of quality healthcare. It is important to note that the prescriptive nature of the articles promotes preventative legal counsel thus contributing to ethical health care within the law.

Nurses should advocate for equitable health services devoid of discrimination. Often, low-income individuals are mistreated in their quest to access healthcare services. Given that emergency health services tend to be easily accessible and of high quality, patients from low socioeconomic background find that emergency treatment enhances health equity and access to high-quality health care. According to Kangovi et al., low socioeconomic households prefer emergency health services leading to low-value health care use (2013). In fact, they perceive ER services to be of higher quality than primary care. In this light, nurses should respect the rights of patients by avoiding discriminatory conduct towards the patients.

Conclusion

The overlap between legal and health services accelerated the codification of legal rules to regulate these emerging developments with the end aim being to preserve human health. Therefore, another intervention by which nursing can incorporate ethical principles into practice is through the institutional adoption of codes of practices and ethical guidelines. The codification of ethical guidelines and professional standards is instrumental in promoting quality healthcare. There is a need for agency nurses to adhere to ethical and legal regulations in the provision of ambulatory and clinical care.

References

Lee, L. M. (2015). Adding justice to the clinical and public health ethics arguments for mandatory seasonal influenza immunisation for healthcare workers. Journal of medical ethics, 41(8), 682-686.

Hwang, J. I., & Park, H. A. (2014). Nurses' perception of ethical climate, medical error experience and intent-to-leave. Nursing ethics, 21(1), 28-42.

Peter, E. (2016). The politicization of ethical knowledge: feminist ethics as a basis for home care nursing research. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Archive, 32(2).

Kangovi, S., Barg, F. K., Carter, T., Long, J. A., Shannon, R., & Grande, D. (2013). Understanding why patients of low socioeconomic status prefer hospitals over ambulatory care. Health Affairs, 32(7), 1196-1203.