The survey has allowed focusing on ethical and legal issues that need further investigation and discussion to guarantee a nurse can make confident decisions. In most cases, it was rather difficult to be decisive and choose strongly agree or disagree answers because of lacking additional data for consideration. Therefore, most answers are somewhat moderate and indicate the necessity of discussing particular cases in detail. Some of the questions triggered personal issues or problematic areas, including physician-assisted suicide (PAS), and it was important to remain objective in these cases. As a result, moderate answers were selected in these specific cases. Still, there were no exceptionally difficult decisions to make in the described cases.
In order to determine the most appropriate response, it was critical to refer to the knowledge received from the books by Butts and Rich (2016) and Pozgar (2014). In addition, it was also necessary to apply legal and professional policies and standards to make a decision. The reason is that different situations are regulated according to specific legal and ethical codes, including the cases of sterilization, PAS, and reporting misconduct, among others. While discussing whether it is possible to make these answers public, one should state that this situation is rather comfortable because all the decisions were made depending on ethical and legal standards, and they were quite objective. Furthermore, although no similar situations occurred in real nursing practice, it is possible to predict that these cases are somewhat typical, and nurses should know how to address them. From this perspective, such inventories can influence nurses’ practice significantly because they accentuate issues and dilemmas that are common for practice, and nurses train how to make confident and appropriate decisions in various controversial situations.
References
Butts, J. B., & Rich, K. L. (2016). Nursing ethics: Across the curriculum and into practice (4th ed.). Jones and Bartlett Learning.
Pozgar, G. D. (2014). Legal and ethical issues for health professionals (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.