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Ethics of Nursing

 Ethics includes values, codes, and principles that govern

decisions in nursing practice and relationships

 Nursing Ethics is the discipline of evaluating the merits,

risks, and social concerns of activities in the field of nursing

 Ethical principles are necessary to guide to professional

development

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 Code of Ethics for Nursing Students

Code of Academic and Clinical Conduct

 The code of Academic and Clinical conduct is based

on an understanding that to practice nursing as a
student is an agreement to uphold the trust with
which society has placed in us

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 A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

 Advocate the rights of all clients

 Maintain client confidentiality

 Take appropriate action to ensure the safety of clients, self ,

and others

 Provide care for the client in a timely, compassionate and

professional manner

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 A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

 Communicate client care in a truthful

 Promote excellence in nursing by encouraging

lifelong learning and professional development

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 A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

 Treat others with respect and promote environment that

respects human rights, values, an choice of cultural and
spiritual beliefs

 Collaborate in every reasonable manner with the academic

faculty and clinical staff to ensure the highest quality of
client care

 Use every opportunity to improve faculty and clinical staff

understanding of the learning needs of nursing students

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 A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

 Encourage faculty, clinical staff, and peers to mentor

nursing students

 Refrain from performing any technique or procedure for

which the student has not been adequately trained

 Refrain from any deliberate action or omission of care in the

academic or clinical setting that creates unnecessary risk of
injury to client, self or others
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 A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

 Assist in ensuring that there is full disclosure and

that consent is obtained from clients regarding any
form of treatment or research

 Abstain from the use of alcoholic beverages or any

substances in the academic and clinical setting that
impair judgment

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Beneficence: means doing or promoting good in such a

manner as to safeguard and promote the interest and well
being of patients and clients

 Nonmaleficence means to avoid doing harm, to remove

from harm, and to prevent harm

 Harm can be physical and so include pain, disability,

discomfort and death but it can also be psychological
and thus include mental stress
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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Autonomy and consent: Principles of self determination

 The cardinal principles of autonomy

 The right to full disclosure- the right to know

 The right to privacy
 The right to receive care and treatment

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Justice: The principle of fairness is the basis for the

obligation to treat all clients equally and fairly

 Veracity: telling the truth. Clients prefer to receive

accurate information about their conditions and
prognosis even when the outlook is bleak

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Privacy:
 To ensure that the patient’s body is appropriate
covered

 To establish a culture of privacy to ensure that

personal information of patients is kept as private
as possible

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Confidentiality

 To preserving the human dignity of patients

 Discussing clients outside the clinical setting, telling

friends or family about clients, or even discussing clients
in the elevator with other workers violates client
confidentiality and must be a voided

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Responsibility: A nurse, who neglects to give a patient pain

relief can be said to have caused that patient harm

 Proving negligence (i.e. that the nurse is legally responsible)

 It is not only human beings who can cause something to

happen, since conditions (e.g. staff shortages, poor
equipment, inadequate resources, and so forth) may also
cause accidents or result in a patient being injured

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 Accountability

 Is about justifying actions, explaining why something

was (or was not) done

 The purpose of calling people to account for their actions

is therefore to establish whether they had good enough
reasons for acting in the way they did

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 Principles of Health Care Ethics

 FIDELITY

 The professional´s faithfulness or loyalty to agreements

& responsibilities accepted as part of the practice of the
profession

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 Be competent in your
practice

 The nurses are always responsible for their behaviours

 Has to refuse to perform procedures for which they haven´t

been prepared

 Ignorance isn’t a legal defence. Neither will lack of sleep or

overwork be accepted as a legal reason for carelessness
about safety measures or mistakes

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 The ICN- Code of Ethics for Nurses
(2006)

 Nurses have four fundamental responsibilities:

 To promote health
 To prevent illness
 To restore health
 To alleviate suffering

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 The ICN Code of Ethics

 Nursing care is respectful of and unrestricted by

considerations of age, color, creed, culture, disability
or illness, gender, sexual orientation, nationality,
politics, race or social status

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 NURSES AND PEOPLE

 The nurse shares with society the responsibility for

initiating and supporting action to meet the health and social
needs of the public, in particular those of vulnerable
populations

 The nurse also shares responsibility to sustain and protect

the natural environment from depletion, pollution,
degradation and destruction

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 NURSES AND THE PROFESSION

 The nurse is active in developing a core of research-based

professional knowledge

 The nurse, acting through the professional organization,

participates in creating and maintaining safe, equitable
social and economic working conditions in nursing

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 Future Implications

 Scientific research over the past two decades has resulted in

rapidly developing technology, greatly altering health care
and medical and nursing practice

 Research has forced health care providers to address such

issues as:
 Who should receive the benefits of technology
 What are the long-term results of life-supporting and life-extending
procedures
 What kind of future generations we are preparing

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 Future Implications

 Having addressed these issues, can we say that our

decisions are ethical?

 What will be the ultimate cost in consumer health?

 What will be the actual cost to society?

 Where do nursing responsibilities lie?

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 Future Implications

 To ensure the best possible consumer health care in

the future, physicians and nurses will have to forge a
closer, more collegial relationship

 Such a relationship will demand a high order of

ethical and professional obligation

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