Nursing concepts and practice

Ethics Nursing

Choose a potential ethical dilemma that you may face in your chosen advanced role as Family Nurse Practitioner. Describe the situation and potential solutions, including collaboration methods.

The ethical dilemma I would like to discuss in relation to my role as Family Nurse Practitioner is that of same-sex partner visitation rights. Family nurse practitioners will encounter a diversity of families during the course of their career. The specific situation I would like to discuss involve a conflict between the Family Nurse Practitioner who is in a position of leadership, and the hospital administration. In this case, the hospital administration expressly forbids anyone but legal kin to be visitors of patients. State law does not yet allow for same sex marriage. Because of this, the administration is reluctant to change their visitation policies. My perspective is that the legality of same-sex marriage does not have a bearing on hospital policy regarding visitation rights. If a committed partner wishes to visit a sick relative in hospital, it is ethically imperative on our part to permit the visitation.

The potential solutions to this problem include the following. First, depending on my role in the hospital, I may call a meeting with the hospital administrator. This meeting would allow me to voice my concerns for the well-being of the patient and his or her family members. If I was a junior member of the team, I would alternatively speak with my supervisor on the matter of allowing the same-sex couples visitation rights. Therefore, communication is one of the solutions. A second solution, if all else fails, is to figure out a way to facilitate communication between patient and partner within the restrictive rules of the hospital. For example, we could use technologies like Skype to allow for video calls. While less than ideal, it is a collaborative solution that would not require the administration to change its policies. Ideally, the solution would be to change the hospital administration policy to allow same sex couple visitation rights because it is the ethical thing to do.

Provide the potential cost and benefits to your solution.

My solution has the potential benefits including the following. First, our hospital would be hailed as a progressive institution that serves all members of its community. Second, our hospital would benefit from improved quality of care. As a family nurse practitioner, I value the holistic approach to nursing. All aspects of the patient's life are taken into consideration. Other benefits more directly impact the patient's outcomes, and also workplace morale. As Oberle & Hughes (2008) point out, "administrators should provide opportunities for discourse to help staff reduce moral distress and generate creative strategies for dealing with this," (p. 707). Finally, benefits include ascription to the most fundamental of tenets of nursing. The American Nurses Association (2010) states that humanist, feminist, and social ethics should at all times be adhered to in the advanced nursing practice. The only costs associated with my solution would be the time and energy spent convincing administration to open our visitation rights policy to all committed partners. There are no foreseeable costs with opening the policy. In fact, the additional visitors would be a financial benefit to the institution in terms of positive publicity and also additional sales in the cafeteria and retail sector attached to our institution.