¶ … Family Centered Care
Family-centered care is a significant part of the nursing profession, and this is becoming more important as healthcare changes and evolves. Nurses are charged with being compassionate in their duties and treating everyone as being valuable no matter what kinds of conditions they have or where they come from (The Guide, 2010). It is the first Provision of the Code of Ethics for nurses, with sub-issues that address human dignity, relationships with patients, the nature of the health problems, the right to self-determination, and relationships with colleagues and others. These courtesies, however, should also extend to the families of those patients, as caring for the family as a whole can make the process easier and more cohesive. This paper will address family-centered care in the context of the Code of Ethics Provision One and the sub-issues that are contained in it.
Provision One and Family-Centered Care
Studies have shown that ICU patients' families can have lower levels of psychological distress if they are provided with informational support from nurses (Bailey, et al., 2010). When the distress of the patient and his or her family is reduced through the receiving of good information from the nurses, the patient's family members are better able to support the patient and cope with that patient's diagnosis, treatment, and care (Bailey, et al., 2010). The way nurses treat these patients and their families is important, as Provision One of the Code of Ethics requires nurses to be caring and compassionate in the duties they engage in....
There are also several sub-issues under Provision One that nurses must carefully consider when they are working with patients. The first of those is respect for human dignity.
In the study done by Bailey, et al. (2010), the goal was for the authors to describe the perception the family members had of the support and information they had been given by the nurses. These individuals all had family members who were patients in the ICU. A large part of their satisfaction with care was based on how the patient's dignity was preserved through the various procedures he or she had to endure. Collecting this information was designed to refine informational support in the author's local area and also provide information about how well nurses were protecting the human dignity of the patient and the patient's family during a difficult time. The main finding was that more informational support meant more satisfaction from the families of ICU patients (Bailey, et al., 2010).
This indicates very strongly another sub-issue under the Provision, which is the relationships to patients. People who care for their loved ones need to make sure they are getting the information they need about those patient's care. Nurses are the ones to provide that information, as the family is an extension of the patient when it comes to care in many cases. Nurses must develop a relationship with the patient, and that must extend to the family of the patient, especially if those family members are caregivers. Additionally, nurses need good relationships with their colleagues, in order to satisfy all sub-issues…
