Question

Conducting Moral and Ethical Dialog in Clinical Practice. Describe your overall experience in a moral and ethical dialog exercise, and address at least three (3) of the following: Did you find any of the scenarios more difficult to deal with than others? Did you feel any internal conflict with any of the scenarios? How did your personal and professional background impact how you decided to interact with the patient? Do you feel the responses the patient gave to the practitioner’s response were reasonable or typical? Were you taken aback by any of the patient reactions? How might this activity contribute to your role as a nurse advocate in a moral and ethical practice? Did you utilize an ethical decision making model to explore a systematic way to evaluate any of these ethical dilemmas? If so, describe the effectiveness.

Answer 1

Answer: Physicians and healthcare professionals are at the center of the health care process. In this central role, they use their knowledge, skills, and defined processes to provide or coordinate health care for patients. The success of the patient-physician relationship is determined by the way this relationship is valued, developed, nurtured, and maintained. Ethics is defined as a system of moral standards or values. Ethics derive from numerous sources, including religion, philosophy, law, institutions, professional codes, corporate mission statements, ethics committees, family, culture, friends, professional associates, and personal experience. In fact, nearly every aspect of society influences the ethical system.

Being a healthcare professional, it is my duty to take care of the patient and treat them well. They are the responsibilities and we should always behave very friendly with them so that they may discuss their problems with us. The changes in health care technology and delivery have created new benefits to patient care, but have created new problems and challenges in ethical decision-making. Based on the knowledge that salience of ethical values influences behavior, some states have mandated ethics education as part of the re-licensure process.

Physicians face ethical dilemmas more often than other professionals, not because the physician has more training or experience, but because people and the community rely on physicians for critical decisions-decisions that have both uncertain consequences and personal implications. The four basic principles of ethics should be followed:

• Autonomy
• Truth-telling
• Confidentiality
• Fidelity