ETHICO-LEGAL ASPECTS OF NURSING PRACTICE

TERMINOLOGIES:

1. ETHICS – as a science for the study of morality of human acts

-division of philosophy that relates to moral judgements concerning human conduct.

It is a study of what a person’s conduct ought to be in a particular circumstances.

GREEK WORD:
Ethos-characteristics way of acting
Ethike-doctrine of morality

LATIN
Mos/Moris- \traditional line of conduct/moral

2. MORES – are the patterns of behaviour which a society determine to be

acceptable

3. NURSING ETHICS – is concerned with the principles of right conduct as they apply
to nursing profession-
- is an applied ethics that nurses use to begin their practice better and able to
understand the scientific basis for patient’s illness and treatment to decide the
rightness and wrongness of a specific nursing actions.

4. PROFESSIONAL CODE OF ETHICS – are applied ethics to bring about the right
conduct of the profession

5. BELIEF – a firm trust or confidence that an idea is true

6. VALUE – quality of a thing event or action that makes it worthy of esteem

7. ATTITUDE – disposition or opinion; a habitual manner of acting feeling or thinking

8. GOODNESS – a state or virtue, excellence or benevolence

9. PRINCIPLE – a fundamental truth or rule of right conduct to guide action

10. MORAL PRINCIPLE – an action guide for protecting and promoting human
interests

1. TYPES OF AUTONOMY
a. freedom of action – ex. patient to leave hospital against his physician
advise
b. freedom of choice – ex. patient right to obtain primary health services from
either a physician or a nurse practitioner
c. Effective deliberation – ex. right of a rational patient to set appropriate
goals according to priority and identifying method to achieve the goal.
2. FREEDOM
- the principle decrees that patients be exempt from control by others to
select and pursue personal health goals
- the principle should be observed by the staff nurses when planning patients
care to explore the patients goals for care on admission to a health agency
and implements measures to achieve the goals to show respect for pt.
Freedom and dependency.

3. VERACITY
- the obligation to tell the truth
- the principle of truth telling requires professional caregivers to provide
patients with accurate, reality-based information about their health status
and care or treatment prospects.
- when informing pt. About his health status, available care measures, a
professional caregiver is responsible for making explanations accurate,
complete and comprehensible.
-truth telling is an ethical concern for nurses, because truth is the basis for
mutual trust between patient and nurses and it is the basis for patient’s hope
of benefit from nursing services

4. JUSTICE
- the obligation to be fair to all people
- the principle directs the persons who are likely in morally relevant aspects
be treated alike and persons who differ in morally relevant aspects are
treated differently.
- Questions of distributive justice arises. Health care professionals must
decide which criteria to use in conflicting claims of care, so that scarce
resources are fairly distributed.
- Compensatory justices are raised when an individual or group has
experienced undeserved health hazards or unfair distribution.
- Retributive justice arise when one person or group has unfairly escaped
burden or exerts undue hardships on another. It is called when an employer
fails to correct a known safety hazard that later injures an employee.

5. NONMALEFICENCE
-the obligation not to harm to other people
- the principle indicates that the individual is morally obliged to avoid
harming others
- the principle is included in the Hippocratic oath “I will use treatment to help
the sick according to my ability and judgement but will never use it to injure
or harm them.”
- the basis for the oft-repeated medical and nursing “naxm primum non
nocere”. First do not harm