Safe pt handling - prof issue paper

[Kitoxy]

I am writing a professional issue paper on safe patient handling and am struggling with a couple of the sections I need to write about. Any help on the following two sections would be greatly appreciated:

Ethical issues: regarding autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and veracity and how any of the previous relate to or are effected by safe patient handling legislation.

Opposing viewpoints: discuss two different solutions to the issue approaching from differing viewpoints.

The bulk of the paper is about how nurses tend to have back injuries from lifting and transferring patients. It discusses the need for more and better assistive devices as well as education for nurses on the devices.

The paper is due Saturday June 5th (yeah, tomorrow) by midnight. Just thought of looking for help on here just now.

Thanks for anything!

[RNTutor, BSN, RN]

The ethical issues are pretty simple to go through if you just know the definitions. Then you can have some fun applying them to the issue you're discussing. For example, autonomy is the ethical principle of "self-control," or allowing the patient to make decisions and be responsible for themselves. Maybe you can discuss the pts' role in transferring themselves as much as possible...it takes more time for the nurse to allow the patient to do this, but allows for more autonomy. Then you could talk about the pros/cons of doing it this way with respect to autonomy.

Then repeat for the remaining ethical principles :)