NRSG370 Assignment: Exploring Safety, Confidentiality in Nursing

This nursing assignment, completed as part of the NRSG370 course, delves into critical aspects of healthcare practice, specifically focusing on safety and confidentiality within a surgical ward setting. The assignment is divided into two modules. Part A addresses a safety issue, exploring its impact on nursing practice, scope of practice, and the nurse's rights and responsibilities. The assignment also examines the ethical and legal dilemmas associated with maintaining patient confidentiality, considering situations where these principles may conflict. The assignment references the importance of communication and coordination in the surgical environment and explores the impact of ethical considerations in healthcare. Part B reflects on the observations and processes related to safety breaches witnessed in the surgical healthcare ward, discussing how these observations have shaped the student's perspective on illness and the role of healthcare professionals in mitigating risks and improving patient outcomes. The assignment references several scholarly articles and guidelines to support the arguments presented.

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
NAME:
STUDENT ID NUMBER;
MODULE:
TOPIC: FOR EXAMPLE – SAFETY
SPECIALTY AREA:
NUMBER OF WORDS:

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Part A
Module 1
Safety is an important parameter in determining quality care which is provided to patients
with proper resources and circumstances using patient-centered care (Greene, 2012). The safety
policies and strategies are imposed on the healthcare facilities so that the risk of unnecessary
harms generated due to the healthcare interventions could be limited to an acceptable level. As
per Chartier (2014), it is impossible to eliminate risk from healthcare processes completely but
due to the presence of risk-reducing strategies, the level of harm can be reduced to an acceptable
level and this level is determined by the level of knowledge about the risk, its efficiency, its
context and so on, which helps healthcare professionals to limit its effect on the patient’s health
(Runciman, Merry & Walton, 2017). While working in the surgical unit of the healthcare facility,
I was aware of the fact that safety is one of the most crucial issues about which, the healthcare
professionals need to be aware of. The healthcare professionals need to be aware of the
medicational errors, surgical errors and preventable healthcare infections so that in the surgical
ward, the risk related to hazardous infections could be controlled (Zimlichman et al. 2013).
Further, I understand the importance of the steps to prevent errors such as wrong site, wrong
person, and procedure which helps to make the healthcare process patient-centered and
determines the prevention of the errors occurring in the surgical ward.
Maintaining safety issue in healthcare facilities is an important aspect for improvement f
the scope of practice as it helps the new healthcare professionals to understand the effect of
surgical safety standards in surgical wards. Zimlichman et al. (2013) mentions that due to the
presence of serious harmful effects of the safety standards breaching in the surgical ward it is

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important for each of the healthcare facility to implement the vigorous efforts to implement the
healthcare standards related to the surgical ward safety and reduce the safety breaching
incidences in the healthcare facility (Chartier, 2014)y. Moreover, there are several issues that I
identified while working in the surgical wards that contributed to the occurrence of the surgical
ward infections and safety hazards. These issues were the involvement of multiple surgeons in
one case that created a communication gap in the care process (Runciman, Merry & Walton,
2017). Further, implementing multiple visits in a single surgical procedure also creates a
miscommunication and synchronizing care provided by the healthcare facility that leads to
breach the safety issues in the surgical ward. Further, researchers Runciman, Merry and Walton
(2017) also mentioned that communication is the most important aspect of delivering healthcare
as communication determines the synchronized care provided by the healthcare facility and
hence, particularly it is an important aspect in the preparatory condition as this process requires
complete coordination between medical ward physicians, nurses and the surgical ward surgeons
and nurses within which pieces of information such as patient identification, their medication
state, their medical record review are transferred (Greene, 2012). Therefore, if communication is
affected in this preparatory phase, then the complete process increases its risk and hazard
affecting the patient health. Therefore, safety is a major concern that allows me to improve my
healthcare skills and help me to achieve my rights and responsibilities as a nurse while caring for
the patients (Chartier, 2014).
Module 2
Confidentiality is termed as one of the most important aspect while caring for patients as
it helps the person to keep the healthcare providers to make the personal and medical information
of the patient private till the moment they receive consent from the patient to share such

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information with his or her family or healthcare professionals (Holloway & Galvin, 2016).
Confidentiality is an important ethical consideration of the healthcare procedure as in the course
of medication, there are several personal pieces of information that the patient share with the
healthcare professional (Nelson & Staggers, 2016). Therefore, in the absence of confidentiality,
the patient-physician relationship will be affected and the patient will not be able to share any
sensitive information with the healthcare professionals (Chib, van Velthoven & Car, 2012).
Therefore, this ethical consideration should be followed by the healthcare facilities and
professionals to create an environment of trust and belief in the healthcare facility and provide
the patient with quality and honest health care. While working in the healthcare facility I was
also aware of the confidentiality related ethical law, However, there are situations in which the
ethical and legal implications of this confidentiality law contradict each other (Rodrigues et al.,
2013). There are instances in the healthcare process when ethically it is not effective to share the
personal information of the patient with his family of professionals in the facility, however,
legally, not informing others harms the patient more. Researchers Chib, van Velthoven and Car
(2012) also mentioned this fact that providing confidentiality to the patient is applicable till the
information in nonhazardous and does not harm the patient.
While discussing the impacts that could arise from non-compliance to healthcare issues
are associated with lawsuit damage, termination, criminal charges, reputation. These impacts are
very much effective in affecting the career of the healthcare professionals as the breaching of any
kind of ethical considerations are not accepted in the healthcare facility (Rodrigues et al., 2013).
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery association determine the fact that healthcare
professionals need to be completely competent to the ethical considerations, but it also provides
the right of beneficence as per which, if the healthcare professional breach any law for the

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benefit of the patient, it will not be determined as the breaching of policy (Viceconti, Hunter &
Hose, 2015). Further, it also mentioned that there are several legal and ethical responsibilities
that the healthcare professionals have to maintain and safeguard the confidentiality and
discretion of the patient for the benefit of the patient as well the society (Holloway & Galvin,
2016). Therefore, from an ethical point of view, this seems effective, however, in situations
where such confidentiality could harm the patient both mentally and physically, the healthcare
professionals need to share this information and in this situation, no such harmful implications
are imposed on them (Nelson & Staggers, 2016). Hence, the lawsuit damage, criminal charges,
termination, and several other negative impacts are not imposed on healthcare professionals
(Rodrigues et al., 2013). Decker et al. (2013) also mentioned that prior to imposing a penalty on
the breaching of the healthcare ethical considerations the board of ethics assessed all the aspect
of the breaching procedure so that a complete understanding of the situation could be understood
and they can use this assessment in determining the reasonableness of such breaching. Therefore,
maintaining confidentiality is an important part of the healthcare process, however, it is also
affected due to contradictory ethical and a legal dilemma (Nelson & Staggers, 2016).
Part B
As discussed in the previous section, I will be discussing the safety issue in the surgical
ward and will reflect upon the observations and processes related to safety breaching I witnessed
in the surgical healthcare ward from the perspective of the health professional. In the surgical;
ward, I witnessed several issues that increased the risk related to the breaching of safety
standards and increase the hazardous risks in the facility. These observations helped me to
understand that it is very important to maintain effective communication in the surgical process
while working with a multidisciplinary team as it will increase the chances of the patient’s health

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improvement. This concept and observations have completely changed my insight and
perspective about illness as I was able to observe processes within the healthcare system that
influences the increase in the health complications of the patient and the interventions using
which the professionals were able to implement health improvement again in the care process.
However, in the course, there are several issues that hindered the healthcare facility to
completely eliminate the safety-related hazards and hence, it was an important aspect of the care
process. Further, I was also able to witness that every healthcare professional within the surgical
ward are in a pressure of completing the work within the specific time period and hence, this
pressure makes then vulnerable to safety breaching.
I was able to relate to this while caring for patients in a surgical ward where I witnessed
that miscommunication occurred due to the presence of multiple healthcare professionals. This
affected the coordination and synchronization of the care process which is important for the
health improvement of the patient. This scenario helped me to understand that the presence of
multiple surgeons in a surgical ward can affect the patient negatively and hence, prior to
working, it is important to build a communication with other healthcare professionals who will
be working within the ward for the collective common goal of providing quality and safe care to
the patient to mitigate the risk. Therefore, these are the concepts and strategies I was able to
observe and implemented in my practice while working in the surgical ward.

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References
Chartier, Y. (Ed.). (2014). Safe management of wastes from health-care activities. World Health
Organization.
Chib, A., van Velthoven, M. H., & Car, J. (2015). mHealth adoption in low-resource
environments: a review of the use of mobile healthcare in developing countries. Journal
of health communication, 20(1), 4-34.
Decker, S., Fey, M., Sideras, S., Caballero, S., Boese, T., Franklin, A. E., ... & Borum, J. C.
(2013). Standards of best practice: Simulation standard VI: The debriefing
process. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, 9(6), S26-S29.
Greene, L. R. (2012). Guide to the elimination of orthopedic surgery surgical site infections: an
executive summary of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and
Epidemiology elimination guide. American journal of infection control, 40(4), 384-386.
Holloway, I., & Galvin, K. (2016). Qualitative research in nursing and healthcare. John Wiley
& Sons.
Nelson, R., & Staggers, N. (2016). Health Informatics-E-Book: An Interprofessional Approach.
Elsevier Health Sciences.
Rodrigues, J. J., De La Torre, I., Fernández, G., & López-Coronado, M. (2013). Analysis of the
security and privacy requirements of cloud-based electronic health records
systems. Journal of medical Internet research, 15(8).

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Runciman, B., Merry, A., & Walton, M. (2017). Safety and ethics in healthcare: a guide to
getting it right. CRC Press.
Viceconti, M., Hunter, P. J., & Hose, R. D. (2015). Big data, big knowledge: big data for
personalized healthcare. IEEE J. Biomedical and Health Informatics, 19(4), 1209-1215.
Zimlichman, E., Henderson, D., Tamir, O., Franz, C., Song, P., Yamin, C. K., ... & Bates, D. W.
(2013). Health care–associated infections: a meta-analysis of costs and financial impact
on the US health care system. JAMA internal medicine, 173(22), 2039-204