2008).. This points to the ethical responsibility of nurse educators -- it is not enough to treat the disease, bit one must treat the patient.
Failure to provide the proper level of education to a patient is certainly one way to fail them both ethically and medically, bit the opposite can also be true. That is, it is possible to provide too much care -- what is deemed "medically futile care" -- and this also raises very serious ethical issues in the realm of respiratory illnesses (Sibbald et al. 2007). This particular stuffy found that insufficient communication among the medical team was one of the primary causes for prolonging futile care, which often means increasing and/or prolonging a patient's discomfort without any reasonable expectation of an improvement in their condition (Sibbald et al. 2007).
The ethical choice here, of course, is to end care (with the consent of the patient and/or their family, depending on the specifics of a given situation). Not doing so unnecessarily prolongs pain, and though the decision to end a life -- or to allow a life to end -- might be a very difficult one to make, such decisions must be routinely carried out in the ethical practice of medicine. Life is to be valued above almost all else, but it is quality of life that truly comes first. Behaving in an ethically responsible way means always keeping this in mind, otherwise one runs the risk of damaging the...
Ethically correct medicine means putting the patients' well being above all else.
Ethics do not only apply to respiratory care, of course, but respiratory illnesses provide many prime examples of the complex way ethics and science interact in the practice of medicine and nursing.
References
Efraimsson, E.; Hillverik, C. & Ehrenberg, A. (2008). "Effects of COPD self-care management education at a nurse-led primary health care clinic." Scandinavian journal of caring sciences, 22(2), 178-85.
Selecky, P.; Eliasson, A.; Hall, R.; Schneider, R.; Varkey, B. & McCaffree, D. (2005). "Palliative and end-of-life care for patients with cardiopulmonary diseases." Chest 128(5), pp. 3599-610.
shiao, J.; Koh, D.; Lo, L.; Lim, M. & Guo, Y. (2007). "Factors predicting nurses' consideration of leaving their job during the SARS outbreak." Nursing Ethics, 14(1), pp. 5-17.
Sibbald, R.; Downar, J. & Hawryluck, L. (2007). "Perceptions of 'futile care' among caregivers in intensive care units." Canadian medial association journal, 177(10), pp. 1201-8.
Wyka, K.; Matthews, P. & Clark, W. (2005). Foundations of respiratory care. New York: Thompson Learning.
