The Ethics for Nurses of Withholding Information from Patients You must create a college-level research report thatfulfills these requirements: Research an ethical issue in your future...

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A Review on the Ethics for Nurses withholding information from Patients
Nurses as well as doctors and family members in any patient care setting, have a tacit contract with the patients in regards to informed consent (Gefenas; Kapp). All patients have a right to know. This is expressed concisely and succinctly in medical ethics. However, the principle of truth telling has yielded controversies amongst health care professionals who find it difficult to tell patients the whole truth. This is observed in circumstances where more harm to the patient is anticipated after sharing particular information. Telling the truth continues to be an operational principle that ought to be determined on patient-to-patient basis. In short, nurses’ concerns and loyalty to the patients is in conflict with honest sharing of all information (Pera and Van Tonder). In a legal proceeding where suits were filed to request the judges of the law courts to make a medical ethical decision, the court ruled that it had no qualifications, mandate or entitlement to make such decisions. This decision making was bestowed to the doctors offering healthcare (Powell). It is understood from this context that the nurses are conferred with the authority to make medical ethical decisions as they also represent crucial participants in a health system (Parker and Hope). The practice of nursing as well as medicine involves both scientific knowledge and ethical decision judgments (Hurst). Nurses are required to justify their decisions with regard to both a scientific background and ethical value systems. Broadly, there are two approaches to ethical dilemmas. These are consequentialism and duty based ethics. The former approach promotes morality to increase human happiness while at the same time reduce unhappiness. Duty based ethics focuses on the features of the actions as opposed to the likely consequences of the action.
The dilemma of telling the truth in the context of nursing practice has often evoked heated debates as to whether nursing ethics should be a distinct category from medical ethics and bioethics categories. In this regards, it was appreciated by (Gallagher) that nursing ethics should be developed in the dimensions of philosophy, experience and regulations. These dimensions however, overlap the other fields of bioethics and medical ethics. Nursing ethics it should be noted, has been revolving around ethics of care, patients’ rights, virtue-based ethics and the four-principle (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice) action plan.
Ethics of care embraces combined aspects of cognitive, affective and motivational concepts that distinguishes it from the rest of the nursing ethics approaches (Gallagher). Nursing practice entails obtaining necessary medical information and history about a patient under their care. The sum information obtained will give the nurse the knowledge, perception or intuition concerning the patient’s situation. This therefore, assists the nurse to have an emotional connection and thus emphasize with the patients’ illness and surrounding. The information obtained also gives the nurse a better direction to offer help to the patient. This approach however, is facing a challenge where the exchange of information between the caregiver and the care receiver as it is supposed to be, has elicited more harm to the patient. This challenge is partially addressed by embracing the feminist ethics responsibility and power roles (Gallagher) that gives a nurse full control to inform in advance a woman patient as opposed to the traditional approach of initially...