Impact of Ethics on Nursing Practice

The Role of Ethics and Security for Nursing Informatics and Practice

Ethics impacts clinical practice by ensuring that nurses recognize healthcare dilemmas and make good decisions and judgements based on their values. Ethics assist nurses in working through difficult situations and offer them a moral compass for doing their jobs fairly. Clinical practice is positively impacted because nurses and other workers have a moral code they follow when treating and caring for patients. Cyberethics protect patients’ privacy and confidentiality. Cyberethics ensures that patient data stays safe and only those authorized have access to the data in clinical practice. Cyberethics ensures the proper use of computers and other electronic devices within a healthcare organization. With proper usage, the risk of leaked patient records or being seen by unauthorized personnel is eliminated. Security impacts clinical practice in that when there is a lapse in security, especially for computers, there is a considerable risk of data loss and compromising patient records. Security focuses on the safeguards to prevent hackers from accessing patient or hospital records. A breach in security would result in enormous losses for the healthcare facility and patients (Beckmann et al., 2021).

It is vital to understand how ethics applies to clinical practice to reduce the chances of misconduct and recognition of ethical dilemmas. Clinical practice requires people to make good decisions based on the underlying code of practice. Before treatment is initiated, it must be analyzed for its positives and negatives. If the positives outweigh the negatives, there is justification for the treatment. Nurses must always respect the dignity and unique attributes of the patient. For example, a patient should be offered all information regarding the treatment and allowed to decide if they want the treatment.

Ethics plays a vital role in informatics and e-health records in that people who have access to digital patient records must handle them in the same way they do with physical patient records. Digital records must be kept safe at all times, and this is done by ensuring that computer screens are switched off or locked when one is not sitting at their desk. Ethics informs healthcare professionals to handle the systems like they do with patients. Privacy is an essential ethical code required when handling digital patient records. Therefore, all healthcare professionals must remain ethical when handling, storing and processing digital patient records (Nahm et al., 2019). Passwords and security offer another level of privacy by ensuring that only authorized individuals will have access to the patient records (Beckmann et al., 2021). Healthcare professionals should be discouraged from sharing their passwords with others and informed how that might breach their ethical code.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a need for healthcare facilities to share patient data (O’Reilly-Shah et al., 2020). However, the sharing of data will result in ethical issues of patient privacy and security of the data. Without proper encryption, there are a high chance hackers can intercept the data. The potential for misuse of the shared data comes to play. The organization receiving the data does not have a direct contract with the patient, and they can use the data as they please. Therefore, other healthcare organizations find it hard to share their data with other organizations. Patients might not have approved for their data to be shared with other organizations, which creates another challenge. Clinical practice is impacted because patients might start refusing to share their data. The healthcare facility that receives the patient data from the patient has to ensure that it maintains the patient’s privacy and confidentiality and does not leak any patient information. Security is affected in that the risk of data breaches increases with interoperability. Once information is shared, the original organization has no control over its use and access. Patient data can be scattered across multiple systems due to a lack of system interoperability (O’Reilly-Shah et al., 2020).