Medical Ethics

There are many responsibilities as a health care provider. There are rules and regulations, there are orders and guidelines to follow. As a nurse, there are many ways to provide non-pharmacological nursing care. For example, restlessness or insomnia can be treated with something as simple as a glass of warm milk and a stomachache can be eased by passing flatulence which is increased by mobility. As a nurse, there are also many pharmacological drug orders the nurse must follow. These orders are based on the best possible care of the patient’s health and diagnosis’. If these orders are followed incorrectly, licenses can be revoked, patients would not be receiving the best possible care and, worst of all, the patient could die. A nurse must really use the best ethical approach when it comes to nursing care.

As a nurse, imagine yourself at the bedside of one of your patients; a cancer patient who is terminally ill. The patient is constantly begging and pleading with you for more pain medication to ease the pain you know hurts so much terminal cancer. The patient says it is their dying wish to be treated with more pain medications to help die in peace. As a nurse, would it be honest and fair of you to administer more pain medication to the dying patient? Would it be fair to physiologically harm another human being just because they are asking you to do so? Ethics are not feelings. Ethics is not a religion. A nurse must really consider a decision to give un-prescribed doses of pain medications by thinking about all possible approaches ethically.

Ethics is a very important standard in the health care setting especially when it comes to deciding to give some terminally ill cancer patient un-prescribed doses of pain medications. As stated in the article, "A Framework for Thinking Ethically," by The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, the utilitarian approach deals with consequences; it tries both to increase the good done and to reduce the harm done. This approach makes me feel somewhat biased because it says to increase the good done and reduce the harm done. Increasing the pain medication would be good for easing the pain and reducing the harm done by decreasing the pain. However, decreasing the pain and reducing harm should be done but also not administering un-prescribed pain medications because of the physiological harm that can affect the patient. This approach has no right or wrong answer but many other factors play into this situation such as nurses losing their license and the hospital being sued for malpractice.

The article, "A Framework for Thinking Ethically," by Markkula Center for Applied Ethics states that the Rights Approach believes that humans have a dignity based on their human nature per se or on their ability to choose freely what they do with their lives. I can agree with this approach because it is a dying patients right to be treated the way they want to be. For example, hospital inpatients have the right to choose if they want the MD or nursing staff to resuscitate