Ethical and Legal Issues in Nursing Practice: A Case Study

UNIVERSITY
NAME
STUDENT ID:
COURSE CODE
COURSE NAME
ASSIGNMENT
The ethical and ethical issue

Ethical perspectives in nursing practice are an essential aspect. It provides the
universal rules of applying practical actions towards identifying intentions and
motives. The key focus of attaining right or wrong lies on the right actions or
wrongs which encompasses the decision making the process. Ethics is
fundamental kin health care is critical as it identifies dilemmas, making effective
judgments and decisions in health care practices. In the case study, Sam, the
registered nurse faces critical dilemmas and ethical issues towards providing
care to the patient. The primary goal of the nurse's commitment is to the patient.
Patient care should always come first. The nurse has the sole responsibility to
recognize the needs of the patient which entail individual thought of care. The
nurses also have fundamental roles in promoting and protecting the rights and
safety of the patient. In this case, the nurse is in a dilemma of whether to offer
the need protection undertaken in the patient and protect their safety and rights
of privacy. Often nurses understand the relevance of informed consent and full
disclosure perspectives underlying patient care (Staunton & Chiarella, 2017).
Hence, in essence, the clinical issues highlighted offers the plight of the nurse in
offering quality care and maintaining nondisclosure of the patient state suspicion
to the parent to maintain patient confidentiality and non-disclosure care aspects.
Ethical and legal principles
As a registered nurse, recognizing an ethical dilemma in care provision is an
essential aspect of nursing practices. There is a need to practice in a manner
that does not affect the client and effective evaluation of intervention outcomes
to promote ethical practices. The nurse faces a dilemma of fidelity entailed with
keeping one's promises. The nurse ought to be faithful and true to their
professional practices. Despite the case, the nurse needs to provide high-quality
care and safe care in a more respectful manner (Grace, 2017). Further, a critical
issue is aspects of autonomy and self-determination of the patient. Upholding
this aspect is critical as it ensures nurses also the patients concerning their own
opinions, values, and beliefs. Often nurses encourage the patients to make their
own decisions without any judgments or concerns from the nurse. One last
critical ethical and legal issue is upholding veracity and being truthful with
patients on concerns they are likely to face. Nurses have the overall
responsibilities of identifying these ethical issues affecting their patients. Further,
undertaking any further care developments need to be cognisant that issues
such as these of providing abortion services to the patient may raise critical

ethical and moral perspectives for nurses (Kangasniemi, Vaismordai, Japser &
Turunen, 2013). Thus all these issues face legal complications since the patient
is still a minor and does not have the right to make and choose appropriate care
wherever needed, thus proofing to be an ethical challenge to the nursing
practice.
Nurses have the sole responsibility for undertaking appropriate actions when
dealing with legal problems. They need to recognize aspects of patient care and
aim at reducing the harm caused. The key process the nurse needs to undertake
is to identify and verify the problem through appropriate nursing assessment,
clearly describing the problem. Collect adequate information through a series of
tests to ascertain the problem, identify, explore and generate a possible solution
to the ethical dilemmas, selecting the best solution, performing the action and
evaluation the results obtained. Thus it is critical to undertake all aspects of care
needed by the patient, by virtue she is still young, respecting the patient wishes
and the nurse's veracity of keeping and maintaining patient disclosure is evident
(Sheykh-Talimi et al., 2016). This is until a further appropriate discussion with the
patient is undertaken on how to solve the nursing issue at hand.
Options applicable addressing the ethical issue
Often ethical issues arise in health care practice and require action and choices
to be made. If inappropriate decisions are taken it can lead to poor quality of
care to patients and cause moral distress problems. Often nurses’ are
susceptible to many nursing problems which cause distress to affect the nursing
care process. Understanding the decision-making process is critical toward
effective ethical solving abilities.
The current state in the case study signifies underlying ethical issues regarding
honesty and withholding patient information. The patient in the case study wants
to withhold any suspicious information to the patient guardian. The patient does
not want her mother to know probable medical issue affecting her for fear of the
unknown. More often nursing ethics and moral issues allow for veracity in
information sharing enhancing patient-nurse relationship (Silva et al., 2018).
The key challenge in this case study situation is to eliminate moral distress
affecting the patient. The nursing goal is to recognize the dilemma and seek an
effective way of addressing it. Findings ways of addressing the underlying