Research Paper About Leadership in the Field of Nursing (Coursework Sample)

Nursing Leadership
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Nursing Leadership
In healthcare settings, nurses encounter various ethical, moral and legal challenges on a daily basis regardless of the where they function or the roles they are mandated to undertake. These challenges can negative impact them and their patients such that main responsibility of a nurse as a healer is compromised. Just like other human beings, when nurses encounter situations where they do not have the freedom to do what they consider "the right thing," they become morally depressed. Although others may have the courage to raise their voices, the majority of them would prefer to remain silent (Aitamaa et al. 2010). Nurses witness the suffering of the patients whom they cannot help because of the legal and protocol frameworks in place that only make the situation a moral burden that can lead to emotional instabilities. The purpose of this paper is to shade light on how a nurse can utilize the leadership skills to solve an ethical dilemma that is aimed at improving the situation at hand by reducing the patient’s suffering.
During my tenure at the St. Elizabeth Mission Hospital in San Francisco, I came across a number of ethical and moral challenges that I did not have understood whether I was the one who did not know what to do or knew what should be done but just ignored. One particular case was this couple that was in the delivery room one Sunday evening. I was on the evening shift and, therefore, her to move here and there to make sure that everything was in order. As part of the duty, I was called in the delivery room to help doctors work on the standoff between them and the parents of the baby. Apparently, the baby was born in the fifth month of pregnancy. According to doctors, it had very slim chances of surviving, and hence they decided to inform the parents that their baby was stillborn. In utter disgust and disbelief, the father of the baby carefully examined it and realized that the heart was still beating. The doctors had reached a consensus that it is better to inform the parents that baby was a stillborn even if it still had a heartbeat. The reason for this decision was not heartbreak and probably upset the first-time parents.
In a quick reaction to this information, the father spoke up and asked why the doctors were claiming the baby was stillborn, yet it still had a noticeable heartbeat. Sensing an imminent confrontation, one of the nurses swaddled the baby and placed it on the chest of an agonized mother. The mother busted into tears and vented her anger at the doctors that stood beside her all that time. "Why are you taking away the life of my little son?" "Why is everyone looking at us without help?" She then grabbed the helm of dress of a nurse standing beside her and asked, "Nurse, is the baby dead or alive? Are you concealing something?" The besieged nurse felt helpless before her patient and doctors. As a registered nurse, Pamela was then two weeks old in her role as the perinatal bereavement coordinator for the St. Elizabeth Hospital. As the two doctors left the room, she went straight to them before diverting to their respective offices armed with courage and moral intuition. She told them that it was not within their rights to decide what to tell parents just because they are afraid of their reaction after that. Pamela stressed that it was important to tell the parents the truth about their child.
In this situation, the issue was whether the parents of the baby, who barely had a chance of living, deserved truthful information from the physicians or not. Nurse Pamela used her knowledge of the professional ethics to guide her decision concerning the baby. According to her, one can easily see that she made sure that an infant is treated as a terminally ill adult. Although death may be very imminent, his information is still vital enough to be recorded, and the respective family should be kept informed throughout the remaining time so that the loved ones can recount on their loss in a peaceful and respectable way. According to Yeo et al. (2010), a nurse must notice the discussions on the ethics of patient care are in no way rooted in the fundamental aspect of realism. In my view, the doctors considered the loss of a baby as a taboo, and that is why they had to lie to the parents so that the bad news are somehow easier to handle. This is a classic case of a patient not being given a proper standard care as per the legal requirements and moral standards.
In a case like this, the Pamela depicted a picture of a moral agent who cares about the patient’s feelings and rights. It was imperative for the doctors to heed to her call and go back to the patient to clear the cloud of confusion. In practice, nurses encounter many of these situations not only in the pediatric care but also in non-acute health care settings such as schools and prisons. Nurses whose ethical contributions are normally ignored experience burnouts and end up being demotivated to work. This explains why cases of nurses deserting their duties for other jobs has been on the rise in the recent times creating a huge gap between the demand and supply capable nurses in the healthcare market (Burkhardt and Nathaniel, 2013). It is important to highlight that not only nurses face ethical, moral or legal challenges in health care fraternity, but other practitioners too. However, the situation for nurses is slightly dif...