Lab Assignment: Ethical Dilemma
As an advanced practice nurse, you will run into situations where a patient’s wishes about his or her health conflict with evidence, your own experience, or a family’s wishes. This may create an ethical dilemma. What do you do when these situations occur?
In this Lab Assignment, you will explore evidence-based practice guidelines and ethical considerations for specific scenarios.
To Prepare
Review the scenarios provided by your instructor. What necessary information would need to be obtained about the patient through health assessments and diagnostic tests? Consider how you would respond as an advanced practice nurse. Review evidence-based practice guidelines and ethical considerations applicable to the scenarios you selected.
The Lab Assignment
Write a detailed one -page narrative (not a formal paper) explaining the health assessment information required for a diagnosis of your selected patient (include the scenario number). Explain how you would respond to the scenario as an advanced practice nurse using evidence-based practice guidelines and applying ethical considerations. Justify your response using at least three different references from current evidence-based literature.
Case study 1: The parents of a 5-year-old boy have accompanied their son for his required physical examination before starting kindergarten. His parents are opposed to him receiving any vaccines.
Confidentiality and considering patients’ wishes are paramount. However, in some instances poise it is necessary to defy such wishes and act according to the healthcare guidelines to protect the lives of people (Molina-Mula & Gallo-Estrada, 2020). In case one, the parents are against the vaccination of their five-year-old body, whose joining the kindergarten exposes him to potential health hazards. The patient is a minor and unable to make his decisions, hence reliance on the parents. However, the decision to defy vaccination risks the life of the boy and his colleagues, especially in the case of infectious disease; hence, further measures are necessary to make logical decisions.
In this regard, crucial health assessment information would include past vaccination history to assess if any severe side effects were identified. Some patients may overreact to vaccinations due to factors such as allergies or genetic factors. If the boy reported such incidences, this would aid in embracing other approaches to protect him against infectious diseases. As an advanced practice nurse, I would consider the parent’s preferences regarding the burdens and benefits of vaccination. According to Uno (2019), vaccination aids the body to develop antibodies for protecting the child against certain diseases; hence preventing exposure to risk is paramount.
Further, I would remind the parents that certain vaccines are compulsory by law due to positive impacts on the population’s health. in this regard, biomedical ethical frameworks are not always fit for guiding public health activity; hence vaccination, in this case, is considerably paternalistic (El Amin et al., 2012). In other words, the healthcare rules and regulations tend to override ethical considerations in cases where enforcement of health guidelines is necessary for the larger community’s benefit.
References
- El Amin, A. N., Parra, M. T., Kim-Farley, R., & Fielding, J. E. (2012). Ethical issues concerning vaccination requirements. Public Health Reviews, 34(1), 14.
- Molina-Mula, J., & Gallo-Estrada, J. (2020). Impact of nurse-patient relationship on quality of care and patient autonomy in decision-making. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(3), 835.
- Uno, M. (2019). Nurse-Patient Conflict: Verification of Structural Model. In Nursing-New Perspectives. IntechOpen.