How The Nurse Should Have Reacted To Uphold Ethical Conduct (Case Study Sample)

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Ethics in Healthcare
Ethics in Healthcare: A Case Scenario
The healthcare profession is guided by strict codes of ethics and legal obligations in practice. According to (Bagley & Levy, 2013,) professionals are trusted with human life, dignity, and privacy when the patient is defenseless and unable to protect themselves. With the incorporation of technology and especially smartphones everybody’s routine, the healthcare profession has faced major ethical issues. Specifically, there are ethical issues which question the use of smartphones while working with patients or using the phones to provide care to the patient. In the case study given, it is crucial to analyze the limits of ethical and legal practice that the nurse overlooked during the night and examine the ethical course of action appropriate for responding to the request she received from gossip paper.
The healthcare professionals in America are regulated by the Health Insurance and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The HIPAA requires that hospitals ensure zero rates of fraudulent activates and abuse of patients’ rights. The body also requires practitioners to strictly adhere to the ethical guidelines used in healthcare some of which include respect for patient’s privacy, autonomy, and confidentiality ("E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications," 2012). The ethical guideline and strict standards for moral conduct are meant to ensure that patients are accorded quality care, their rights are protected and are given a chance to recover with dignity.
Confidentiality is at the core of healthcare practice. Information that the professional acquires from the person through examinations or self-reports is protected to remain between the patient and the professional unless the patients give consent to share it with significant others or even the public. According to (Bagley & Levy, 2013,) practitioners are also bound by law to protect such information and can only share it when summoned by legal authorities or when they deem that sharing such information might be helpful to rescue the patient from danger. In the given case, the nurse shares a picture of the celebrity with a friend as a dare game and to bond with her friend. Such actions are unethical, according to the principals of beneficence and non-maleficence, the nurse is authorized to decide to share a patient’s picture when doing so is inclined to help the client. Also, in non-maleficence, sharing the patient’s picture can only be argued to be ethical if it creates a vulnerability to the least risk possible (Brzezinski, 2014). At the same time, the benefits that the patient is bound to receive should considerably outweigh the risk they are exposed to. Contrary to the two ethical principles, the nurse shares the patient's picture with her friend, and it might end up in the media.
Worse, the nurse argues that since her patient is a celebrity, his life is public. Such an argument shows disrespect for the client’s rights, privacy and independence as a person. The personal bias has crowded the nurse’s judgment. Also, while on her shift, the nurse kept texting with her friend who was at the concert and at the same time attending to the patients. At one point she concludes that it is unfair of the boss to put her on a shift at the last minute. The nurse appears to be going through some personal issues with the organization. Having such difficulties is expected and allowed. However, it is not ethical to allow personal issues and subjective judgments affect the quality of service given to the patient (Amer, 2014). Again, the nurse expresses disregard for patients respect and overlooks their rights to receive the highest quality healthcare available.
When the nurse contacts her friend, she is informed that the gossip magazine is offering her $20,000 in exchange for the picture she took of her patient the night before. In the case, the nurse appears to be considering the offer since she desperately needs a car and is behind on some bills. Besides, she considers that her name will not appear anywhere with the pictures. The transaction is safe for her since the buyer protects her identity and makes her an incredible offer. With these considerations, it would appear okay to go for such a deal. However, if she were to take the deal, such a decision would hurt the nursing practice and hurt the patient rights to confidentiality and autonomy.
On a broad category, the use of smartphones may result in positive and negative consequences. In regardto the given case scenario, it has become inevitable to have smartphones in the health field (Amer, 2014). Some advantages of having smartphones in the field include the ease of communication that they present. Practitioners in the field can easily reach out to their significant others even when they are at work. As such they can easily concentrate at work and still feel connected to their loved ones. However, the uncontrolled use of smartphones can be detrimental to the practice. For instance, the nurse was texting with a friend while working. Such actions are deemed as unethical.
Smartphones’ ease of communication can be helpful for the patient, for example, the nurse can use it to call the patient’s significant others and hence ena...