How do your values influence care given?

I took what you read and printed it off so I could read it at work today and let me tell you it all made sense and I had this huge moment of clarity, and all the information just flowed, so much that I had a hard time stopping what I was writing.

You represent what this website is about, you helped prompt me to think deeper and to draw on my own knowledge and past experiences.

Thank you very much

Milenko

I think what you are being asked is how your own beliefs may influence what you end up saying to patients and what medications you are ordered to give the patients, as well as how their behaviors affects their disease process and the medications they take for them.

A) If you are definitely opposed to smoking and, lets say, you have someone in your family who is severely asthmatic and lives with a smoker you are going to draw from that experience in talking with a smoking asthmatic patient. The smoking aggravates her asthma; meanwhile she is taking medication to treat the asthma. You are giving her the asthma medication. What are your feelings about that?

B) Someone who thinks that obesity is totally preventable and just represents a person's inability to control themselves may feel a lot of resentment toward any diabetic teaching of an obese person. If her diabetes went untreated she would lose weight for sure!

C) I've known nurses who have made comments that if someone is refusing their mediation, so be it, without making any attempt to find out why. This is especially a concern when the medication may be something very necessary to keeping them alive.

D) Think about what your own feelings are about a 16 year old who looks for every opportunity to go out and get drunk with her friends. She shows up where you're working as your patient. Can you be non-judgmental, or are your own little thoughts and feelings about what she is doing going to influence how you talk to her or treat her? Her alcohol intoxication is going to be an important thing to take into consideration when giving any medication because many drugs cannot be taken with alcohol.

I think your assignment is asking you to consider your own attitudes and prejudices toward these situations given that you are the nurse having to care for them.

I had to have an IJ placed due to kidney transplant rejection, and while the catheter was being shoved into my neck, a nurse standing to my left said, loud enough for the whole OR to hear, "Well, that's what happens when you don't take your meds like you're supposed to!" If I hadn't had a large needle in my neck, I'd have gotten up and smacked her-- I was already suffering enough, I didn't need her editorial comments on top of it!

It later turned out that, while I had been non-compliant with meds, the main reason for the rejection was an aneurysm in the renal artery-- which that nurse could have seen had she bothered to look at the ultrasound before she opened her big mouth. The other nurses might have been thinking that I caused my rejection-- but at least they had the courtesy to talk about me AFTER the procedure, not right in front of me!

I think it would be a good idea for nurses to ask themselves if working with a patient they perceive to be at fault for a medical problem will likely cause them to treat that patient with less courtesy than they would show any other patient-- if so, the nurse could request not to care for that patient. Even when we're in great pain, patients DO hear snide remarks and it makes it harder to trust the people who are supposed to be helping us.