Clinical Ethics Handbook For Nurses

This handbook provides tools for nurse educators, ethics educators, practicing nurses and allied health professionals for developing confidence and skill in ethical decision making in interdisciplinary settings such as acute and chronic care hospitals and clinics. It is useful for all healthcare personnel who face ethical issues in the course of their work and who work with nurses to resolve these issues. While the content is based on a US context, the concerns of nurses internationally are discussed and emphasized. Nurses working in acute and chronic care settings face many obstacles to providing good care and are often the first line of defense related to patient safety and meeting the needs of patients and their families. Some of the obstacles to optimal patient care are institutional, some sociocultural, and others the result of inadequate communication. Evidence points to the idea that while nurses do have the knowledge and skills to address practice problems of various sorts, they may not be confident in their skills of ethical decision making and advocacy actions. This is a resource to develop moral agency on behalf of individuals and to address broader barriers to good care raised at the local, community, or social levels.

Healthcare ethics help guide and influence the way physicians, nurses, and other members of the healthcare team care for patients and make decisions. Ethics address the moral dilemmas that arise out of conflicts with duties or obligations as well as the consequences of decision-making. As healthcare has continued to grow and evolve, so has the way healthcare ethics are handled. Nurses are uniquely positioned to serve as leaders in healthcare ethics because they are intricately involved in all aspects of patient care, including care coordination, recommendations for plans of care, provision of life-sustaining interventions, and patient education. The Nurse’s Healthcare Ethics Committee Handbook focuses on a nurse-led ethics consultative service. Authors Angeline Dewey and Andrea Holecek provide tools that nursing students, professionals, administrators, and other members of the healthcare team need to develop infrastructure and processes that support nurses in an ethics committee leadership role. Filled with real-life scenarios, this book outlines a step-by-step process for nurses to evaluate ethical cases and the risks involved

This book presents ethical issues and case studies from the perspective of nurses. What should a nurse do when patients, family, and physicians have varying perspectives on what care should be provided? When and how should a nurse intervene to protect an elderly person from a hazardous living situation? This text will help readers prepare for the ethical dilemmas of health care and participate in the debate about how health care should be delivered in today's complex environment.

How can dedicated health care ethics committees increase their effectiveness and demonstrate their value as essential moral resources for their organizations? Among the most effective and increasingly valued resources in the health care decision-making process is the institutional ethics committee. The Joint Commission (TJC) accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations in the United States, including hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. As a condition of accreditation, TJC requires health care organizations to have available a standing multidisciplinary ethics committee, composed of physicians, nurses, attorneys, ethicists, administrators, and interested lay citizens. Many of these committees are well meaning but may lack the information, experience, skills, and formal background in bioethics needed to effectively address the range and complexity of the ethical issues that arise in clinical and organizational settings. Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees was conceived in 2007 to address the myriad responsibilities assumed by ethics committees. Using sample cases and accessible language, Linda Farber Post and Jeffrey Blustein explored applied bioethics, including informed consent and refusal, decision making and decisional capacity, truth telling, care at the beginning and end of life, palliation, justice in and access to health care services, and organizational ethics. In the third edition, Post and Blustein have thoroughly updated and reorganized the content and expanded the scope of the material, with special attention to changes in the health care landscape since the second edition was published in 2015. They also focus on communication between and among patients, care providers, and families, the demands of professionalism, the essential role that ethics committees can and should play, and how their effectiveness and value can be assessed. An entirely new chapter examines research ethics. The book also addresses the challenging ethical issues raised by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This guide remains an essential resource for all health care ethics committee and their members.

"From the classroom to professional practice, nurses will find Guide to the Code of Ethics for Nurses a powerful tool for learning how to apply the values of service in the Code of Ethics to their nursing practice." -- Book Cover.

With chapters revolving around practical issues and real-world contexts, this Handbook offers much-needed insights into the ethics of primary healthcare. An international set of contributors from a broad range of areas in ethics and practice address a challenging array of topics. These range from the issues arising in primary care interactions, to working with different sources of vulnerability among patients, from contexts connected with teaching and learning, to issues in relation to justice and resources. The book is both interdisciplinary and inter-professional, including not just ‘standard’ philosophical clinical ethics but also approaches using the humanities, clinical empirical research, management theory and much else besides. This practical handbook will be an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking a better appreciation and understanding of the ethics ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘for’ primary healthcare. That includes clinicians and commissioners, but also policymakers and academics concerned with primary care ethics. Readers are encouraged to explore and critique the ideas discussed in the 44 chapters; whether or not readers agree with all the authors’ views, this volume aims to inform, educate and, in many cases, inspire. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Kath Melia's new book on ethics works in the gap between nursing theory and practice. The chapters tackle the main theories which form the discussion on ethics, and include practical case examples, which bring these theories into the clinical context. These classic and everyday cases challenge the reader to critically reflect on his/her own experiences and outlook.

Short case studies, based on real stories from the health care arena, ensure that each chapter of this book is rooted in descriptions of nursing practise that are grounded, salient narratives of nursing care. The reader is assisted to explore the ethical dimension of nursing practice: what it is and how it can be portrayed, discussed, and analysed within a variety of practice and theoretical contexts. One of the unique contributions of this book is to consider nursing not only in the context of the individual nurse – patient relationship but also as a social good that is of necessity limited, due to the ultimate limits on the nursing and health care resource. This book will help the reader consider what good nursing looks like, both within the context of limitations on resources and under conditions of scarcity. Indeed, any discussion of ethical issues in nursing should be well grounded in a conceptualisation of nursing that nursing students and practising nursing can recognise, accept and engage with. Nursing, like medicine, social work and teaching has a clear moral aim – to do good. In the case of nursing to do good for the patient. However it is vital that in the pressurised, constrained health service of the 21st century, we help nurses explore what this might mean for nursing practice and what can reasonably be expected of the individual nurse in terms of good nursing care.