It wouldn’t be wrong if we would say that nurses are a major element in keeping the healthcare foundation strong and functioning. Even in the absence of a doctor they continuously monitor their patient’s health and at times of emergencies, they may take a holistic approach to improve their patient’s health.
Apart from improving and saving lives, nurses are also given the responsibility of patient’s advocacy. They are the ones to educate their patients about how the treatments work and about the necessary procedures. They are also responsible to protect their patient’s interest when they are unable to do so because of their medical condition or insufficient knowledge about the healthcare terms and procedures. However, most of the nurses face challenges when practicing ethics due to inadequate education and other restrictions based on ethics.
The Dilemma
The problem aggravates when there are no proper or continued educational resources available on ethical challenges faced by these nurses. Even while they are being formally educated, the courses they are taught does not properly shed light on all that there is to ethical problems. Realizing the crucial need for nurses to stand up and advocate in their patient’s interest, many nursing schools are now teaching “Moral Courage,” as a subject.
Case In Point
Jessica is a registered and practicing nurse for almost 20 years now. She knows more about how things work at her hospital as she is the charge nurse for her shift too. Last week, Jessica was told by a Doctor on duty that one of her nurse named Brianna has been interrupting within her work procedure about a patient.
Brianna, who is also a competent and experienced nurse, when asked about this, told Jessica that she has been asking the doctor to increase sedatives because of the patient’s medical condition. Jessica was then presented with all the objective data of the condition and she also monitored the condition using the SBAR technique (Situation Background Assessment Recommendation). It was quite apparent that it would be in the best interest of the patient needs more sedation. However, knowing the nature of the doctor both, Jessica and Brianna were unable to approach the doctor and communicate for the best interest of their patient.
Patient Advocacy
Many nurses, find it hard to come forward and present their views in light of their patient’s care and better wellbeing. The gist of patient advocacy lies in the support and protection of a patient’s interest. However, while doing so, nurses often find themselves in a complicated situation where their professional and personal morals are at stake. There are often questionable situations where patient’s rights are violated and they are unable to demonstrate their moral courage in preventing the rights of the patient.
Moral Courage
Moral courage needs to be established and developed among nurses to help them identify what action is required when your patient’s interest is being compromised. Therefore, moral courage is correlated to practicing virtue ethics in a way that it enhances the importance of your subjects’ needs and rights rather than just performing the duty out of professional obligations. The practicing of virtue ethics involves resolving conflicts through proper understanding of what is in the best interest of patients.
Obstacles in Practicing Moral Courage
Like Jessica and Brianna, many nurses undergo similar highly conflicting situations in their nursing career. They either find some peer support, develop the courage to speak or just keep doing as told by the doctor. The third scenario is the most common and is worst of them all because not being able to speak up for their patient leads to suppressing their opinion and further causing stress and depression. This discourages them from upholding to their ethical standards and questioning their own loyalty with the patient. Many healthcare organizations and practitioners, deject nurses from advocating for their patients. Seeing this, nurses themselves circumvent from showing their moral courage.
Here are a few barriers that were commonly seen in most of the healthcare organizations:
Most of the times it is the organizational culture that can set a code of ethics that involves considering the opinion of a nurse if she is speaking in favor of his/her patient. An organizational culture can either set some standard to encourage moral courage. Nurses should also be given the power to report unethical behavior of a doctor or those senior to them.
Peer support plays a crucial role in practicing moral courage. If in a healthcare organization, don’t support those that are morally courageous can result in reluctance by those who are willing to take necessary actions.
Due to a suppressing code of ethics many nurses somehow tend to accept the unacceptable, due to the fear of losing their jobs or other professional problems.
The importance of moral courage and patient advocacy is far more crucial for health care practitioners than for any other professions. Sometimes, the emotional and cognitive actions needed in critical times can be challenged by the individual not knowing what action to take and how. It is high time that our nurses are trained and educated to deal with such situations without having to compromise their ethics or their profession.
By Zyana Morris
Nursetogether
No comments:
Post a Comment