Bio-207 Ethics Paper Review

Tracey R. Walker

Biology 207

Ethics Paper

Biology 207 Ethics Paper Review

The article, “Ethical dilemmas in nursing” provided an insight on the ethical dilemmas that nurses were faced with involving the care of their patient’s. The article provided a glance into the ethical rights that nurses are entitled to while providing care to their patients.  In the article, three examples of ethical dilemmas were presented as a means to review the firsthand look at what purpose ethics serve within the fundamentals of nursing.  The article expressed the main point of that too often nurses are faced with asking the difficult question of what is the right thing to do regarding the best interest of their patients.

The article discussed the dilemma of nurses being directly involved in the treatment decisions concerning the patient’s well being. The main point of the article is that nurses were not acknowledged nor perceived as important in the overall ethical issues surrounding their patient’s. In order to resolve this issue, I believe that a nurse’s opinion is greatly needed in the ethical issues relating to a patient. Nurses are the individuals who provide primary care to the patient and therefore they have a vast amount of knowledge relating to the patient’s ethics. In resolving the ethical dilemmas within this paper, at all times nurses should be given the right to express their main concerns in reference to the health of their patients, and in the end a nurse’s input into any situation will ultimately determine the fate of a patient.

The insights that I have gained on bioethics from reading the article are that first and foremost bioethics is not considered as a critical component in the medical profession and that the role of a nurse is overlooked in the medical profession in regards to the best interest of a patient. The second insight that I have gained on bioethics from reading the article was that the ethical dilemmas of nurses will continue to remain unaddressed simply because of the way a nurses role is viewed according to the medical profession, being that they provide care to a patient, but does not necessarily know what is best for the patient when faced with an ethical issue. In my opinion bioethics should apply to everyone that is involved in the direct care of the patient, not just the doctors who have an in-depth knowledge of the patient’s medical history.  The third insight that I gained on bioethics from reading the article was that bioethics takes into consideration a matter of life and death, pain and suffering, and rights and responsibilities involving the ethical issues of patients. The ethical dilemmas of nursing should become a number one priority in medical ethics in order to provide nurses with a better mechanism of coping with and their addressing their concerns during the rise of an ethical dilemma.