Ethics Question

Nursing Students General Students

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I have to write a term paper on some ethical dilema that affects healthcare workers or some medical ethical issue. I was thinking of what the ethical obligation for a nurse to advocate for his/her patient but I don't know if I could make ten pages of that. Also, I am going to need some articles of others opinions and such to support my argument. Anyone have any ideas?

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Specializes in Med-Surg, Trauma, Ortho, Neuro, Cardiac.

I don't think an ethical dilmema is the same as the ethical obligation of being a patient advocate. Being a patient advocate is the core of what nursing is but not a dilmema.

So it depends on what your paper is about. That is a good topic if you're talking about what nurses should ethically do: be a patient advocate, keep them comfortable, be nonjudgemental, etc. etc.

Ethical dilmemas include things such as should it be mandatory for nurses to report all cases of adult domestic violence to the authorities, can family interests ethically outweight patient autonomy, end of life issues such as nurses giving pain medicine to dying patients with low blood pressure and low respirations, can adolescents make their own life and death decisions, futile treatment, etc.

Good luck.

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Specializes in Cardiac.

A few years back (maybe only 2) the voters down here in Tucson passed a bill that made it a crime for any healthcare worker to treat people without proof of citizenship. If they are a suspected illegal immigrant, we would have to turn them in, or risk jail time. I'd say that's a ethical dilema!

http://www.defeat200.org/docs/medical.html

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i agree with the PP. other ethical dilemas would be:

assisted suicide..

stem cell research (ex: nurse is against it, but does she work in a clinic that perform the transplants)

abortion - you can even take the route of the pill that is out. should nurses be required to give the pill even if it goes against personal beliefs? should pharmacists be required to fill the prescription? given how much this is in the news lately you should be able to get a lot of info on it. on the same lines, some states have outlawed abortion except in some cases.....a nurse is against abortion, can she not care for that patient as long as she gets someone else to trade patients with her...there is lots you can do on this subject...easy to get 10 pages

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Specializes in NICU/L&D, Hospice.

We just did a paper on this. It was actually given as extra credit (bless them!) and only had to be one page, but I wrote down all the topics, since I thought they were notes on the board when we started class.

Maybe this will give you some ideas. I did mine on an article I found about nursing students noticing professional nurses doing proceedures that were out dated, or against protocol. What do you do? Speak out or Shut up was the title. It was VERY interesting.

Euthanasia, neonatal technology for survival, consent forms/informing/family, code controversy/family presence, prenatal genetic testing, assisted suicide, prison inmate transplants, celebrity attention (get better care?), natural disasters, nurse/client professional relationships, confidntiality/phone calls, partial birth abortion.

Some may not make sense. These were how our instructor wrote the topics on the board. Good luck!

Woogy

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Specializes in MICU.

I just finished a ten page paper for my nursing ethics class and I wrote about mandatory genetic testing in adolescence (before childbearing age) for Huntington's Disease. There was a lot of information available about the ethics of genetic testing in children. You could do a paper on a number of genetic diseases. :twocents:

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Specializes in Emergency Dept, M/S.

I took Bioethics last summer, and did a paper on prisoners, even those serving long or life sentences, being able to be placed on the list for an organ transplant. It was amazing the number of people that assumed that they couldn't be placed on such a list, but they can. Prisoners also have very good health insurance (compliments of all the taxpayers in the US), but they do have rights, and access to good healthcare and organs is one of them. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, and I must say, the topic got a very heated discussion going.

Especially when you consider that some prisoners may not have "life" sentences per se, but be 45 and have to serve 25 years before they are eligible for parole.

Then someone threw in the fact that they may be a child molester.

Anyway, it was a good discussion, and I learned a lot writing the paper.

Good luck! There are lots of great topics.

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