E-Portfolio: Legal and Ethical Considerations in Nursing Practice

This assignment, presented as an e-portfolio, delves into the legal and ethical frameworks essential for competent nursing practice. The student addresses key aspects such as accountability, defined as the nurse's obligation to perform duties with sound judgment and be answerable for their actions. The paper emphasizes the importance of maintaining professional boundaries, particularly regarding patient confidentiality and privacy, and highlights the potential legal consequences of breaches. It outlines the significance of professional values like respect, altruism, and compassion in guiding nursing practices and fostering therapeutic relationships. The student also discusses ethical dilemmas, such as conflicts between beneficence and patient autonomy, and outlines strategies for navigating these challenges, including critical thinking, ethical frameworks, and seeking guidance. The assignment references relevant literature to support the discussion and reflects on the student's understanding of these critical aspects of professional nursing, including an update on the most important principle learned about maintaining professional boundaries. The student also updates their professional and moral values and discusses how they will guide their professional nursing practice and ways to handle legal and ethical challenges.

Running head: PROFESSIONAL NURSING
PROFESSIONAL NURSING
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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PROFESSIONAL NURSING
Legal issues and structures:
Accountability can be defined as the obligation of the nurses to perform duties, tasks as
well as roles with the proper use of the judgment. The nurse should be answerable for the
decisions made in doing this. Accountability can be defined as the duty by which nurses should
be able to provide an account of their judgments, actions as well as their omissions.
Accountability can be defined as maintaining competency and thereby includes safeguarding
quality patient care outcomes as well as maintaining the standards of professional at the same
time of being answerable to those who are affected by one’s nursing and midwifery practice
(Kangasniemi, Pakkanen & Korhonen, 2015). Therefore, breaches in both the attributes may
result in legal obligation harming the health of the patient due to negligence of care affecting
human rights. Breaching the acts of beneficence, equality of care to all irrespective of class and
creed and many others may lead to obligations when professionals are not responsible and
accountable.
Professional boundaries to be maintained:
One of the most important aspects that should be maintained by the healthcare
professionals while providing care is confidentiality and privacy. Overriding the professional
boundary may result in not only harmful impact on the patient but also results in cancellation of
license and getting involved in legal obligation. Breaching the aspects may affect the personal
life as well as professional lives of the patients that may expose them to violence, harassment,
abuse, humiliation or attacks and many others (Parandeh et al., 2015). Often many of the nurses
are seen to override their professional boundaries by enclosing information of patients over
social media that leads to many legal obligations of professionals and breach in human rights of

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the patients. Hence, maintaining this principle within the professional boundary ensure safe and
quality care to patients.
Professional values and morals:
Professional values mainly help in guiding the different practices of the nurses ensuring
that the patients are not only satisfied with their care but that all the care services are following
ethical and legal frameworks. Respecting human dignity, social justice as well as altruism is
some of the values that ensure self less devotion to the patients. Autonomy in decision making as
well as precision and accuracy in caring ensure that patients not only get high quality care but
also can develop a trust on the professionals that have positive impacts on their emotional and
mental health. Responsibility and inculcating effective traits to maintain human relationships are
the ways by which nurses can develop therapeutic relationship with the patients (McCarthy &
Gastmans, 2015). Mutual respect, trust and reliance along with caring for patients with love and
kindness are some of the foundations of nursing profession. Sympathy, empathy, compassion,
integrity and competency ensure professionals to develop bonding with patients that ensure
compliance of the patients with the treatments and hence result in better quality care.
Challenges:
Healthcare professionals often face many incidences where they go through ethical
dilemmas. These ethical dilemmas mainly rise from the conflict of the bio-ethical principles that
include beneficence and autonomy. Autonomy instructs professionals to perform care services
after consents from the patient and conducting the interventions according to the preferences and
consents of the patients (Alkaya, Yaman & Simones, 2018). On the other hand, beneficence
ensured professionals to provide care that are safest and have best health outcomes. Often there

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are many incidences where the care that is decided by the professionals to be of the best results is
rejected by the patients that may create harm to them. Professionals have the duty to save lives
but laws like advanced directives, “do not resuscitate” and many others often result in ethical
dilemmas among the professionals thereby evolving as potential challenges in their fields of
practice. I will try to apply proper critical thinking skills, ethics of justice, respect for patient’s
autonomy and dignity and try to take decisions in the light of these factors. I will try to find
evidence based articles to get over my dilemma and take suggestions and advice from seniors.
All these would help me to take correct decisions and prevent myself from getting involved in
any legal obligation.

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References:
Alkaya, S. A., Yaman, Ş., & Simones, J. (2018). Professional values and career choice of nursing
students. Nursing ethics, 25(2), 243-252.
Kangasniemi, M., Pakkanen, P., & Korhonen, A. (2015). Professional ethics in nursing: an
integrative review. Journal of advanced nursing, 71(8), 1744-1757.
McCarthy, J., & Gastmans, C. (2015). Moral distress: A review of the argument-based nursing
ethics literature. Nursing Ethics, 22(1), 131-152.
Parandeh, A., Khaghanizade, M., Mohammadi, E., & Nouri, J. M. (2015). Factors influencing
development of professional values among nursing students and instructors: a systematic
review. Global journal of health science, 7(2), 284.