Nursing profession contains rules and regulations that guide the nurses on their everyday practice, the rules govern the relationship between the nurse and the patient. These rules that guide the nurses are the ethics. Ethics are very important for nurses because it provides description of commitments that the nurses are required to maintain. It allows the nurses to learn the decision making process. Decision making process provides the framework for working and understanding through all ethical decisions (Dolgof et al., 2009). It helps the nurses to identify ethical values, which are important in supporting and providing nursing care.
During practice, several experiences come up that require ethical decision-making. Issues of legality of the type of care to administer to the patient become very challenging. In most cases, the end of life care brings many legal and ethical debates. Cases exist when the life of a patient must be terminated to give the patient a good death. Making this decision is often the most challenging especially for the nurse. This decision should be considered in terms of beliefs and values of the patient and the relief it will offer to the dying patient (Lo, 2009). Taking the life of the patient away in order to for the patient to have a decent death is ethical but it is illegal.
It is illegal to terminate someone’s life with or without the persons consent. The nurse owes a duty to care and provide treatment to the patient but ethical issues on the quality of life during certain stages of care will require terminating the life of the patient to offer a decent death. Such scenarios bring difficult ethical issues between the public and the professionals.
References
Dolgoff, R., Loewenberg, F. M., & Harrington, D. (2009). Ethical decisions for social work practice. Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks/Cole.
Lo, B. (2009). Resolving ethical dilemmas: A guide for clinicians. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
