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Introduction to Nursing Ethics and Jurisprudence

• This course aims to educate nursing students on the ethical and legal considerations in nursing and medical practice.
• It introduces constitutional and common laws affecting nursing, including the legal implications of nursing responsibilities.
• The purpose of the course involves defining ethical principles and codes for nursing practice and outlining issues of jurisprudence relevant to nursing, such as state and federal laws impacting nursing and health care.

Course Objectives

• Students will be able to address moral development that contributes to value clarification
• Students will be able to discuss ethics in accordance with nursing practice
• Students will be able to examine rights and responsibilities of the patient as well as the role of nurses
• Students will be able to address potential area of liability and legal protections
• Explore ethical challenges
• Students will be able to resolve ethical problems

What is Ethics?

• Ethics are formal values that guide moral human behaviour.
• Ethics study values relating to right and wrong actions, as well as goodness and badness of motives.
• It studies the effects of moral principles and standards on human conduct.
• Business ethics optimize profitability within a context of right and wrong
• Codes of ethics are moral principles that maintain high ideals and ethical issue discussions.
• Ethics are principles that govern a particular profession's practice.
• The NMCN has created ethical codes for nurses and midwives to regulate nursing conduct in Nigeria.
• These ethical codes cover five subdivisions including nurse's appearance, attitude, practice, society, and relationship with health team members.

Understanding Values

• A value is a belief or attitude about the worth of a person, object, idea, or action and guides behaviour.
• The value ascribed to something dictates how someone behaves toward it.
• Value systems are basic ways of life that directs life and shape behaviour, especially choices.
• Values are not innate but formed by lifetime information from family, environment, and society.
• Children adopt honesty as a value if their parents consistently demonstrate it.
• People need societal values for a sense of belonging and personal values for individuality.
• Nurses acquire professional values through nursing socialization.
• Professional values are clarified and internalized within nursing education.
• Nursing codes of ethics, standards of practice, and the legal system state specific professional nursing values.

Essential Values in Nursing Practice

• The American Association of colleges identified seven professional nursing values.
• Ethical principles forms the basis of nursing and a framework used in ethical decision making.

Seven Essential Values of Nursing Practice

• Altruism involves concern for others' welfare, demonstrated through caring, commitment, compassion, generosity, and perseverance. It includes giving full attention to clients, assisting personnel, and expressing concern about issues impacting health care.
• Equality includes acceptance, assertiveness, fairness, self-esteem, and tolerance It involves providing care based on individual needs regardless of personal characteristics, interacting without discrimination, and expressing ideas for improving access to nursing and health care.
• Aesthetics includes appreciation, creativity, imagination, and sensitivity. It involves adapting the environment to please clients, creating pleasant workplaces, and projecting a professional image of nursing.
• Freedom includes confidence, hope independence, openness, self-discipline, and self-direction. It includes honouring the right to refuse treatment, supporting alternative treatment plans, and encouraging discussions on controversial professional issues.
• Human dignity includes consideration, empathy, humanness, kindness, respectfulness, and trusts. It involves safeguarding individual’s right to privacy, addressing others as they prefer, maintaining confidentiality for clients and staff, and treating everyone respectfully.
• Justice includes accountability, authenticity, honesty, inquisitiveness, rationality, and reflectiveness. This involves documenting care accurately and honestly, obtaining necessary data for judgements, reporting policy infractions, and protecting the public from misinformation about nursing.

Value Clarification

• Value clarification is a process of identifying, examining, and developing individual values.
• Identifying values results in personal growth by fostering insight.
• Student nurses analyzing their life, health, illness and death values have a vital role in decision making.
• Personal values promote awareness to decide what to do in specific situations, like abortion or euthanasia.
• Nurses should render services without judgement while examining choice consequence
• Values should be clarified so the decisions are in the client, nurse, and institution's best interest.

Morals Explained

• Morals refers to personal values or principles.
• Morality deals what is right and wrong that dictates an individual's conduct, character and attitude.
• Morality is essential to people living in a society.
• Moral behaviour is a person's way to perceive and respond to requirements
• Moral development is the transformation of moral behaviour with age

Moral Development

• Moral development involves learning right from wrong and what should/should not be done. It begins in childhood and continues throughout life.
• According to caring theories, actions are judged by caring and responsibility.
• It acts as a central force in the client-nurse relationship for protecting and enhancing the client's dignity.
• Moral principles statements about broad, general, philosophic concepts which provide the foundation for moral rules.
• Principles based theories show focus rights, while care theories focus good for the group.

Ethical Principles

• Beneficence are acts of kindness and charity that improve the welfare of others .
• Nonmaleficence prevents harm to others or inflicts minimal harm.
• Autonomy supports the right to self-determination and decision-making.

Key ethics to understand

• Autonomy is respecting someone's decisions. Nurses honour it by recognizing each client’s uniqueness and right to choose goals. They respect the client's decision, even if it seems not in their best interest.
• Non-maleficence is avoiding of harm, which may occur intentionally/unintentionally in practice.
• Although harm risk is not always clear, nurses must protect patients. Even helpful nursing interventions, like drug administration, could cause harm.
• Beneficence is acting for others' benefit and furthering their interests. An integral professional work ethic, which professionally favors client well-being with no exception.
• Nurses should benefit their clients by implementing actions for their benefit as well as care professionals have a duty of care to patients, colleagues, and the wider community
• Justice act with the expectation to treat all fairly and give a degree of respect and concern
• In every degree and measure possible give every care, unmindful of race, religion, culture or type of illness
• Veracity is a ethical principle and truthful actions in all interactions with others
• Fidelity means being faithful to individuals who rely on you for care and support
• Integrity and accountability means basing action on standards of consistent honesty

Nursing Ethics

• Nursing ethics, standards for nurses' actions, is a formal statement of nursing's ideals, values and it also covers behavior, being normally right for nurses in workplace settings.
• The Code of Nursing Ethics, a non-negotiable standard, serves as the guide to nurses, and it is important to remember that nurses remain committed to society.
• Nurses must regularly pursue education and practice based on evidence .
• Societal code of ethics will also change over time
• It acts as a guide nurses for client care.
• Professionals do not make decisions, but individual nurses have an obligation to internalize the course to use in their practice.

Professional Ethics

• Formulating codes of conduct reminds a nurse of greater patient demands
• Facilitates skill development and the creation of care policies
• Ethics encourage one another to improve culturally according to practice and professional standards
• Professional ethical decision is an important aspect of improvement

Importance of Ethics in Nursing

• Nursing practice is based on its professional status.
• Ethics help nurses manage conflicts related to duties and responsibilities.
• It serves as a reference to make ethical descions
• Nursing performs their duties with instilling confidence

Additional info on the Importance of Ethics in Nursing

• It is a problem solver for the nurse.
• Ethics promotes mutual trust and respect in health care and the health of diverse patients with diverse culture
• Ethics creates accountability while weighing a patient's thoughts to reach a decision

Ethics and Law

• Law are society's enforced rules of conduct, recognized by authorities.
• Ethics are moral principles/values informally governing individuals in society.
• Laws dictate mandatory behavior while ethics dictate morally accurate behavior
• Law and ethics have common professional standard

Law and Ethics Confluence

• Modern blending of ethics, law, and healthcare stems from an increasingly legalistic modern society.
• Healthcare consumers are more aware of their rights and will take legal action.
• Law reflects societal values, guiding morality and adhering to laws that protect welfare with avoided violation rightts.

Differences Between Law & Ethics

• Law is a systematic body of rules governing society and its members and ethics is moral philosophy that guides human conduct.
• Law maintains social order, peace, and protection for citizens.
• Law requires compliance with rules regulations, ethics requires following guidelines.

Ethical issues in nursing

• Ethics essential to integrity in quality patient care
• The nursing code is revised with updated social contracts.
• Ethics in nursing comes from protecting patients' rights of staff and the quality of patient care.
• Ethical guidelines include human dignity, confidentiality, moral virtue, and healthcare as a right.
• The ANA states all provisions cover challenges for nursing.
• Nursing ethics need that the patient's wishes be kept in mind for safety

Informed Consent

• Informed consent is an increasing ethical concern, especially if the family has no information about the treatmen
• Nurses must make sure the patient has appropriate procedure information for obtaining informd consent.
• Family members withhold data about sick patients
• The ANA advocates that physicians follow honesty with patients who should know everything about medical care.

Privacy and Confidentiality

• Patient privacy may have impact for healthcare and legal procedures.
• Nurse managers help to make environments and mistakes and approaches for ethical challenge

Patient Decision-Making

• Patients receive the right to use beliefs and values
• Even when treatment doesn't align with client's choice
• Nurses respect patient's decision

Types of Ethics

• Personal and professional are two aspects of ethics.
• Personal ethics includes the ideals from behaviour
• Professional ideals are formal and shared ethics that monitors and supports professions

Purposes of Professional Codes of Ethics

• The code of ethics serve is efficient
• Minimum guidelines are enforced
• Members must be well informed
• Consistent professionalism is needed over time
• Ethics promotes self regulation

The responsiblity of Nurses

• Nurses advocate for patients must have the ability to advocate for care, consideration and ethics
• Knowledge of ethics should begin at the start of practice

Patient's Rights & Responsibilities of Care

• To make patient's rights more apparent ethical behavior is expected by societal and individual values

Common ethical dilemmas in practice

• Patients have the right to patient freedom

Additional Ethical Issues in Nursing

• Nurses are bound to treat all patients with welfare in mind.
• Lying must be an exception
• Honesty, information, and family must line up to benefit the patient
• Nurses must be present with the proper decisions to the minor client
• The balance of a battle of beliefs, opinions and testing must be discussed
• There are limitations to some patients on resource management

Steps to Ethical Decision Making in Ethical Dilemmas

• Clarification takes priority
• Data must then be collected with identifying next option
• Make a decision based on the evaluation

Patients Bill of Rights

• Patients need respectful care and a second opinion

• The right to refuse, privacy, and the need to not experiment exist with patient consideration.

• The right to have a relationship while in hospital

Responsibilities Patient Bill of Rights

• In order to support the patient all the right should be followed
• It all to protect the lives of those you care for under ethical practices

International Code Nursing

• Nursing ethics are a framework for ethical practices with guidance with roles, duties, responsibilities and all professional actions

• Nursing Ethics builds on standard laws

• Has principles that provide an unethical framework.

  • Nurses that require services
  • Nurses need to focus practice around their service of the individual to provide ethics
  • Nurses and health need

Ethical practices

• the nurse, in providing care, promotes a safe environment while respecting values
• Judgement will be used to keep information safe
• Responsibility with initiation is needed the meet social, human rights

Key Nursing Practices

• Nurses should act to provide personal health care and conduct
• Health should be the priority

Nursing Profession Duties

• Nurses advocate to implementing standards and practice
• Nurses are core figures in their practice's knowledge with what society needs
• The main focus it serve with society when ethical practice or unethical practices