Paper Example on Ethical Dilemmas in Healthcare: Resolving Conflicting Priorities

Ethical dilemmas are regularly experienced in healthcare settings, as nurses continue to face difficulties in making choices between two moral activities. Unfortunately, if these dilemmas are not addressed accurately, then the success of one decision can occasionally yield a severe impact on the other side. Typically, proper management of patient flow and performing scheduled activities may pose conflicting priorities. Sujan et al. (2015) suggested that leaders should engage in collaborative strategies, by using elements such as dialogue and directing, to promote mutual awareness of everyone's roles and responsibilities in alignment with the organizational goals, to perform activities toward the realization of sustainable improvement. This would not only allow clinicians to work strictly within their departments of specialization and thus get motivated to perform better as they improve their skills, but also to reduce errors associated with long working hours. Gaining new skills would enhance the nurse's morale to work, and the quality of care is likely to improve.

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One of the current national healthcare issues is patient privacy for electronic health records (EHR) (Sun et al., 2011). Typically, most healthcare organizations are still adapting to the current technology; therefore, the limited computing devices are usually used by the healthcare providers, to store patient's information. Practically, nurses are often restricted to use the computers for work-related activities only, and not for personal usages such as opening social media platforms or live-streaming videos from various sites, sent by friends and family members. Nevertheless, due to the commitment that nurses regularly put in place to offer quality care, it is natural for them to feel bored and stressed, because they spend more extended hours without getting in touch with their loved ones. As a result, they may occasionally be compelled to use the same computers to connect to their friends as a way of refreshing and relieving stress. It is therefore difficult for healthcare organizations to set privacy policies and restrictions for using the computers because they fear, patients may be subject to poor quality healthcare if nurses fail to get freedom at the workplace. On the other hand, privacy is an emerging issue, and failure to make laws puts the organization at a higher risk of losing its information to unauthorized hands (Sicuranza & Esposito, 2013). Nurses too find it conflicting to forego their refreshment by connecting to friends and delivering poor quality healthcare.

References

Sujan, M. A., Chessum, P., Rudd, M., Fitton, L., Inada-Kim, M., Cooke, M. W., & Spurgeon, P. (2015). Managing competing organizational priorities in clinical handover across organizational boundaries. Journal of health services research & policy, 20(1_suppl), 17-25. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1355819614560449

Sun, J., Zhu, X., Zhang, C., & Fang, Y. (2011, June). HCPP: Cryptography based secure EHR system for patient privacy and emergency healthcare. In 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (pp. 373-382). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5961718/

Sicuranza, M., & Esposito, A. (2013, December). An access control model for easy management of patient privacy in EHR systems. In 8th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2013) (pp. 463-470). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6750243/

Response Post 1

The colleague's primary concern is the issue of nurses being overwhelmed by tasks that ought to be done by other health professionals. Notwithstanding, the colleague points out that, despite the challenge of overtasking, health administrators and management personnel have failed to offer additional benefits to acknowledge and appreciate their commitments of ensuring that patients receive quality healthcare despite their limited number. I tend to coincide with a partner that, many nurses are reconsidering their decisions of being full-time nurses, and could drift either partially or fully to other income-generating activities to help them manage their bills. Vahey et al. (2004) articulated that increasing levels of nurse burnout could significantly impact patient outcomes. However, Russel et al. (2019) outlined that, adding more nurses could not be a guarantee to patient and nurses' satisfaction; instead, healthcare administrations should improve the quality of the working environment by introducing performance appraisal programs and additional benefits, to enhance the nurses' morale of work or motivation.

References

Russell, R., Leal Morales, Y., Adefisoye, J., & McCue, V. (2019). Effect of Resiliency Education on Emergency Nurse Burnout and Patient Satisfaction. https://scholarlycommons.baptisthealth.net/se-all-publications/3293/

Vahey, D. C., Aiken, L. H., Sloane, D. M., Clarke, S. P., & Vargas, D. (2004). Nurse burnout and patient satisfaction. Medical care, 42(2 Suppl), II57. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc2904602/

Response Post 2

My colleague begins the post by pointing out the impacts of competing needs in nursing healthcare that have emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The colleague writes that one side, there has been a shortage of personal protective equipment for nurses who are handing COVID-19 patients; thus, strict measures have been put in place to limit face-to-face interaction with anyone in the healthcare settings. For instance, visitation has been limited o one individual, most health workers for other departments who are not concerned with the management of pandemic have been sent home, to create space, so that social distancing is practised as a way of preventing the spread of COVID-19. Interestingly, the colleague states that these measures have been conflicted by a rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 patients, as more nurses have been recalled to manage the problem of the nursing shortage.

The organizations face the dilemma of maintaining social distancing rules, as well as addressing the nursing shortage, which has led to the deaths of many patients in recent times. Ideally, I tend to agree with my colleague. Still, I would further suggest that the issue of personal protective equipment shortage must be solved before anyone expects a positive outcome from the social distancing rules. Payne et al. (2016) stated that personal disinfecting equipment should not be used whatsoever to assume that the users are safe from infection. Payne et al. (2016) further noted that viruses and other microbial bacteria had different lifecycle and thus took different time interval to get denatured by disinfectants completely. Research done by Atzori et al. (2020) stipulated that the COVID had alternating development stages that were hardly understood by scientists. To connect this to the idea of Payne et al. (2020), it can be concluded that managing these competing needs at the time of pandemic using existing policies is uneasy since both decisions pose a detrimental impact.

References

Atzori, L., Ferreli, C., Atzori, M. G., & Rongioletti, F. (2020). COVID19 and impact of personal protective equipment use: From occupational to generalized skincare need. Dermatologic Therapy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267141/

Payne, T., Mitchell, S., Halkon, B., Bibb, R., & Waters, M. (2016). Development of a synthetic human thigh impact surrogate for sports personal protective equipment testing. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part P: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology, 230(1), 5-16. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1754337115582294