Values, Rights, and Ethics
These are personal beliefs and ideas about what is important, desirable, or worthwhile.
Values
Formerly known as the Patient’s Bill of Rights, this document explains what patients should expect during a hospital stay.
The Patient Care Partnership
The first step in ethical decision-making is to clearly identify this.
Ethical problem or dilemma
This state law defines nursing licensure requirements, permitted titles, standards of conduct, and scope of practice.
Nurse practice act
Failure to act with the level of care that a reasonably careful person would use under similar circumstances is called this.
Negligence
These are legally or morally protected claims that allow individuals to make choices and receive fair treatment.
Rights
The primary purpose of the Patient Care Partnership is to promote communication, understanding, and cooperation between patients and these individuals.
Health care providers and hospital staff
After identifying the ethical problem, the health care provider should collect relevant clinical, legal, cultural, and personal information. This is known as doing what?
Gathering the facts
Practice acts protect patients by establishing the minimum standards needed for this type of professional care.
Safe and competent care
This form of professional negligence occurs when a licensed health care provider fails to meet accepted professional standards and causes patient harm.
Malpractice
This discipline examines principles of right and wrong conduct and guides professional decision-making.
Ethics
Under the Patient Care Partnership, patients should receive care delivered with skill, compassion, dignity, and this quality.
Respect
The third step involves determining which personal values, professional standards, and ethical principles apply to the situation.
Identifying the relevant values and ethical principles
A nurse who performs a procedure that is not permitted by the state nurse practice act may be practicing outside this legally defined boundary.
The scope of practice
Failure to observe a suicidal patient as ordered, improper use of restraints, medication errors, and breaches of confidentiality are examples of these.
Areas of potential legal liability
A nurse personally opposes a patient’s decision but continues to provide respectful, unbiased care. This demonstrates the ability to separate personal values from these standards.
Professional ethics
Before agreeing to a procedure, a patient has the right to receive understandable information about its purpose, risks, benefits, and alternatives. This process is called what?
Informed consent
Developing possible courses of action and predicting the benefits and risks of each represents these two ethical decision-making steps.
Considering alternatives and examining their consequences
This legal process permits psychiatric evaluation or treatment without the person’s consent when statutory criteria are met.
Involuntary psychiatric commitment
Accurately recording assessments, interventions, medications, patient responses, and communications fulfills this major legal responsibility.
Complete and accurate documentation
Autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, fidelity, and veracity are examples of these guides to professional conduct.
Ethical principles
The Patient Care Partnership supports a patient’s legal and ethical ability to accept or do this to a recommended treatment.
Refuse treatment
After selecting and carrying out the best course of action, the final step is to determine whether the decision produced an ethical and effective result.
Evaluating the outcome
In many jurisdictions, involuntary commitment begins with an emergency evaluation or temporary hold, followed by clinical assessment and, when continued confinement is requested, this legal safeguard.
Court hearing or judicial review
Maintaining confidentiality, obtaining informed consent, and reporting suspected abuse or credible threats are three examples of these professional obligations.