Strategies for Promoting Ethical Decision Making in Health Care Essay

Strategies for Promoting Ethical Decision Making in Health Care Organizations - Essay Example Moral sensitivity and ethical awareness raises sensitivity to the details of the situation, case, or scenario, and promotes the professional to raise questions in order to justify the right and good, just and fair, respect for individual human dignity, benefits, and burdens. It signifies that ethical decision making a complex process with multiple angles with mainly social implications that tends to analyze factors such as ethical principles, social and interactional aspects, and situational and contextual factors. It is important to remain aware that all these factors need to be considered while making a decision in clinical practice. Taking the example of the issue of autonomic "right to die", this is common issue in clinical practice, especially in the critical care nursing practice. However, practically the issues surrounding death and dying is no longer simple for its legal implications and technological advances that can sustain life for unimaginable duration of time. In these situations, the nurses face dilemma for allocating resources to these patients, and this often enters into the decision making process. The patient's wishes and concerns of the family also impact decisions. For nurses, these ethical situations become more crucial due to invariable conflicts between professional duties and obligations and ethical responsibilities. This means the nurses are faced with the conflicts between the duty to meet the needs of the patients and the obligations to follow hospital policy in that particular issue, implying they are obligated to comply with doctor's orders and legal implications of various interventions and patient-related actions even though the ethical principles do not permit them. In the current scenario, the critical ethical principles will be examined in a critical manner based on this preamble and evidence for current policies would be sought as it is relevant to practice and clinical decision making (Vanlaere, L. and Gastmans, C., 2007). Case: This is the story of a 67-year-old man, who lost control of his vehicle and had struck a guardrail in a single-vehicle collision. He was not wearing a seatbelt and was ejected through the windshield and sustained severely traumatic closed head and chest injuries. He was brought to the trauma center via helicopter and was admitted to the neurological intensive care unit. The staff provided support to the patient as per medical advice, and he was receiving mechanical ventilation and was unresponsive. Obviously he was surrounded by multiple invasive catheters and equipment. The trauma team briefly met the patient's daughter who was the only family present, soon after the admission, and they explained the grave prognosis of her father to her. This patient's care was complex, and the nurse preceptor along with a junior postgraduate nurse was administering the care. The investigations revealed that the patient had severe internal hemorrhage in the brain and in the chest, and some tra uma to the heart could not be ruled out. The patient was on mechanical ventilation through intubation, was in deep coma, was nil orally until the consciousness was restored. The other parameters that were being monitored did not show any sign of improvement, and the patient could not be stabilized to the required degree so as to be able to perform