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Health Care Ethics

Licensed Practical Nurse Guide: Health Care Ethics

Whenever you put your life into the hands of a health care professional, you are trusting that they will treat you with respect and dignity, and with high ethical standards. If you couldn’t trust your doctors and nurses, you might not seek medical attention when you needed it, and could end up badly injured or terribly sick. That’s why we have ethical codes for medical professionals—official guidelines that regulate their behavior. Because nurses must follow these guidelines, patients can trust that they will be treated with care, respect and dignity.

Basic Principles

The concepts behind most ethical nursing codes are relatively simple. The main goals of any nurse should be to promote and restore health, prevent illness and alleviate suffering. But in pursuing these goals, a nurse must also honor the human rights of her patients. She may not judge or discriminate on the basis of culture, race, age, gender, sexuality, politics, social status or medical condition, she must use great discretion before disclosing any private information entrusted to her, and she must do her utmost to ensure that her patients are always well-informed enough to make good decisions about their own medical care.

Additionally, the nurse has a responsibility to her profession and others within it to stay informed about new developments in the field, be well-practiced in all necessary skills, maintain her own health and hygiene, build strong relationships with her coworkers, and ensure that high standards are kept within her workplace. This can sometimes mean speaking out against a coworker or superior, but the nurse must remember that her primary responsibility is to the future health of society in general.

Confidentiality

One of the key issues in medical ethics is the question of doctor-patient confidentiality, or the patient’s right to keep their medical information and condition a private matter. While it’s easy to regulate things like patient charts, ensuring that they are not released publicly, it’s harder to draw the line with personal information the patient discloses orally. A nurse must use her best judgment and do her utmost to keep any secrets her patients disclose to her that are not harmful to their health, while also making sure the doctor is getting any information that might be relevant to the medical case.

In a recent study from the Pennsylvania University Center for Bioethics Study, researchers found that the majority of medical patients don’t fully understand or trust confidentiality laws, and will often act independently to protect their information—which can sometimes mean lying. For this reason, it is essential to build a relationship of trust with your patients, and make sure they understand what their legal rights to confidentiality are.

Conflict of Interest

Another common issue in medical ethics is the concept of conflicting interests. There are a couple different ways that this can manifest. They are:

  1. The doctor or nurse has a personal relationship with the patient. In this case, the nurse may not be able to treat the patient objectively, because she is too emotionally involved. For example, if the patient is the nurse’s father and he needs a medication that is currently low on stock, the nurse might decide to just give it to him rather than see if there are any other patients who need it more. That could result in the death of another patient, and the blame would fall on the nurse. When this situation arises, the nurse can defer the case, or often her superior will just automatically give it to another nurse.
  2. The patient holds a belief or practice that is in conflict with the nurse’s own moral code. While nurses are suppose to treat all patients equally, without regard for religious belief, political preference or any other quality, they are still human and sometimes those conflicting viewpoints can get in the way. For example, if the nurse is a homosexual, and her patient is a well known anti-gay-marriage activist, the issue may be too close to home for her to overlook. If a nurse knows that she has such a conflict of interest with a patient and she cannot trust herself to treat him fairly, she must let her superiors know and step down from that case, so that he can receive treatment from a nurse who doesn’t have a conflict. This variety of conflict of interest is far less common, though it does arise occasionally.

Additional Resources

Codes of Ethics

  • ANA Code of Ethics
    The American Nurses Association’s code of ethics, available in view-only format for free.
  • ENA Code of Ethics
    The Emergency Nurses Association’s code of ethics, as well as mission statement and strategic plan.
  • Nursing Practice Standards
    A document on practice standards and ethics in nursing, from the College & Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta (Canada).
  • Nursing Students: Code of Ethics
    A nursing code of ethics adapted especially for nursing students, from the University of Texas at Arlington.
  • The ICN Code of Ethics for Nurses
    The International Council of Nurses’ code of ethics, which has been the standard since 1953.

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