Nursing concepts and professional practice

Nursing

Teaching Ethics in Nursing

Dinc, L. "Teaching Ethics in Nursing." Nursing Ethics. 9.3 (May 2002): 259-268.

Nursing education attempts to provide nurses with a broad-based framework of knowledge to cope with difficult medical situations. However, it has been increasingly acknowledged that nurses must also be prepared to cope with the ethical challenges of their profession. To determine how feasible this can be in an academic setting, a qualitative and quantitative survey of a class of Turkish nursing students was conducted, to assess student feelings about a course they had experienced on the subject of nursing ethics. The researchers found that the students said that the class discussion of ethical principles was particularly useful, although the legal teachings of the course were somewhat lacking.

This article provides an interesting example of the way that ethical education of nurses in a foreign country is conducted. It demonstrates how nurses are universally curious about the subject of ethics, and exhibit a desire to gain a securer foothold in the subject, and understand how it relates to their professional studies. The article may have been more engaging in terms of its writing style, and more informative, if it did not just report the study, but also recorded some personal comments from the students, and reviewed more of the specific ethical and moral problems scenarios covered in the class. Still, it affirms the desire amongst nursing students for more in-depth nursing education classes devoted to ethics.

Private Sitters Fulfill Patients' Needs

Trafford, Abigail. "Private Sitters Fulfill Patients' Needs." Los Angeles Times. 15 Jan 2001: S8.

Increasingly, the families of patients in hospitals are hiring private nurses to provide the type of comprehensive nursing care that hospitals cannot provide. Although nurses were once considered the guardians and caretakers of patients, they are increasingly overburdened, and what was once basic care is now considered a luxury. Hospitals sometimes discourage the use of outside sitters, fearing liability and conflicts with the staff, but patients' families disagree. They fear their loved ones will not get quality care for their patients without private assistance.

It is saddening to note that as hospital stays grow more expensive, patients are getting less care and families must resort to the private sector and pay still more money to feel as though their loved ones are being treated competently. The problems are rife, legally in terms of liability and medically in terms of nursing conflicts over patient treatment. There is also the ethical issue that the poor are getting less decent care than the rich, because poor families cannot provide private nurses. Clearly, hiring private nurses or assistants is not the solution to an overburdened medical system, but families will continue to do so to protect their loved ones until a better solution is achieved by policy makers.

Poststroke Rehabilitation

Deutsch, Anne, Rodger C. Fielder & Kenneth J. Ottenbacher. Stroke. 37 (Jun

2006):1477-1482.