FRANCISCO APPLE JOY G.

BSN 4 A

Nursing Leadership and Management Related Learning Experience

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

Ethical Issues in Nursing

USA
A Reflective Journal

Ethics-related issues in patient care have long presented difficulties for nurses worldwide.
Florence Nightingale highlighted the ethical responsibilities of confidentiality, communication,
and the significance of attending to patients' needs in her work Notes on Nursing. Today's nurses
should uphold the fundamental moral responsibilities, duties, and principles underlying the
nursing profession. However, given the challenging moral decisions and pressures that nurses
must deal with, it has becoming harder for nurses everywhere in the world to practice with
integrity. In order to meet the patients' complex needs, the current healthcare environment is
demanding for nurses at a time when there is a significant workforce shortage. Any healthcare
circumstance where fundamental moral considerations of "rightness" or "wrongness" influence
clinical judgement and the compassionate care given to patients may involve an ethical issues.
As they deal with the challenging and sometimes stressful phenomenon of dealing with ethical
problems, nurses as well as other members of the health care team can understandably be
impacted by moral decisions. Seventy-nine percent of the 934 nurses surveyed by the American
Nurses Association Center for Ethics and Human Rights at the ANA Convention in 1994
reported confronting ethical issues in practice daily (43%) or weekly (36%). The significance of
ethical problems that nurses commonly run into in a variety of clinical practice situations, as well
as the stress that these problems cause them. While more than two-thirds of respondents rated
staffing shortages as the most stressful problem, they cited the preservation of patient rights as
their most frequent ethical issue. It is challenging to uphold the moral requirements of
professional activity without an adequate workforce. National and worldwide policies are
urgently needed to establish a highly skilled workforce. Healthcare organizations should
anticipate the variety of ethical issues that nurses face on the job, as well as how this affects their
stress levels and capacity to provide for their patients. To lessen the loss of providers that
regrettably may occur as a result of these ethical challenges, ethics support is required. This
support includes ethics committees, bioethicists, and senior nurse mentors.

References:
Connie M. etc Al. (2010) Everyday Ethics: Ethical Issues and Stress in Nursing Practice. NCBI.
Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3865804/