Nursing Code of Ethics Quiz

Nursing Code of Ethics

• Guides nurses in providing compassionate care, advocating for patients, collaborating with healthcare teams, maintaining accountability, and ensuring fairness and respect for all patients.

Ethical Principles

• Veracity: Telling the truth, ensuring patients have all the information needed to make informed decisions.
• Fidelity: Keeping promises or commitments, upholding trust in the nurse-patient relationship.
• Beneficence: Acting with compassion and kindness, prioritizing patient well-being.
• Nonmaleficence: Obligation to do no harm, preventing harm through skilled care.
• Autonomy: Respecting patient's freedom and independence to make their own decisions, even if those decisions differ from recommended treatment.
• Justice: Ensuring fair and equitable treatment, access, and resources for all patients, regardless of background.

Professional Values

• Altruism: Acting selflessly for the benefit of others, even at personal risk.
• Integrity: Honesty, moral uprightness, and strong ethical principles in all actions.
• Competence: Providing safe, effective, and skilled care through knowledge, skills, and judgment.
• Professionalism: Demonstrating compassionate, ethical care, maintaining competence, and upholding integrity in all interactions.
• Confidentiality: Protecting patient privacy by not sharing personal or medical information without consent, ensuring trust and compliance with laws like HIPAA.
• Efficiency: Providing high-quality care in a timely and organised manner, using resources wisely, and prioritising tasks to meet patient needs.

Advocacy

• Nurses advocate for patients by speaking to doctors on their behalf, ensuring their concerns are addressed, and advocating for changes to their care plan when needed.

Social Justice and Health Disparities

• Social justice aims to reduce health disparities by ensuring fair access to healthcare and addressing inequalities that influence health outcomes across different groups.

Ethical Dilemmas

• Situations where there is no clear right or wrong solution, and different options may have both advantages and disadvantages.
• Steps to address ethical dilemmas:
  • Identify if an ethical dilemma exists, considering differing values.
  • Clearly define the ethical dilemma, identifying what is affected and the actual problem.
  • Identify possible solutions.
  • Apply ethical principles to the solutions.
  • Include all relevant individuals and factors.
  • Decide on a solution.
  • Review the decision for completeness and new concerns.
  • Put the decision into action.

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)

• Requires emergency medical personnel to provide equal care to clients entering the emergency department, irrespective of their insurance or financial status.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA)

• Federal law protecting an individual's identifying private information and personal health information.
• Violating HIPPA can have legal and ethical consequences, including:
  • Termination
  • Fines
  • Loss of nursing license
  • Exposure to litigation (potential for imprisonment)
  • Ethical violation of client’s right to privacy

Unprofessional Use of Social Media

• Can lead to breaches of patient confidentiality, damage to reputation, disciplinary action, and legal consequences.

Types of Law

• Criminal Law: Protects the public or society as a whole.
• Civil Law: Protects individual or personal rights guaranteed by federal law, like the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
• Administrative Law: Regulations from the nursing board governing licensing, standards of care, and disciplinary actions to ensure safe, legal nursing practice.
• Federal Law: Set of nationwide rules, like HIPAA and the Affordable Care Act, ensuring privacy, access, and non-discrimination in healthcare.

Legal Terms

• Negligence: Failure to act as a reasonably prudent person would, resulting in harm to a patient.
• Assault: Threatening a patient with harm or showing intent to touch a patient without permission.
• Battery: Intentional physical contact without consent that causes injury or offensive touching.
• Defamation: False information that harms a person’s reputation.
• Malpractice: Failure to meet professional standards of care, resulting in injury to a patient.

Types of Consent

• Informed Consent: Permission to provide care given by the client after being educated about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure.
• Implied Consent: Client’s permission is implied by the circumstances or actions surrounding a medical or nursing action.
• Written Consent: Patient-signed agreement after full explanation of a procedure, risks, and benefits, ensuring their understanding and voluntary agreement.
• Verbal Consent: Spoken approval given by the patient after being informed of the procedure details, often used for less invasive procedures.

End-of-Life Documents

• Living Will: Document stating which life-sustaining treatments a client wishes to have performed if they become incapacitated.
• Durable Power of Attorney for Healthcare: Document appointing an individual to make healthcare decisions on behalf of the client if they cannot do so.
• Do Not Resuscitate (DNR): Medical staff will not perform CPR or other life-saving measures if the patient’s heart or breathing stops.
• Last Will and Testament: Legal document outlining how a person wants their assets and belongings distributed after they pass away.

Mandatory Reporting

• Nurses have a legal obligation to report certain findings, such as suspected abuse or neglect, to appropriate authorities.

Near Miss vs. Actual Incident

• A near miss is an event that almost caused an adverse outcome (e.g., wrong medication was selected but not administered) but did not result in harm.
• An actual incident is an event that resulted in harm to a patient.

Test your knowledge on the Nursing Code of Ethics and its fundamental principles. This quiz covers topics such as veracity, fidelity, beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, and justice, which guide nurses in delivering ethical care. Understand the core professional values that shape nursing practice.