Patient’s safety is the most important component of quality nursing care. Nurses perform plenty of functions connected with the safety of a patient’s health, but also they should care from a legal standpoint.
This is the American Nurses Association (ANA) that defines the importance of advocacy in its Code of Ethics in the Provision 3: “The nurse promotes, advocates for, and strives to protect the health, safety, and rights of the patient”. This is to say that the nurse may play a role of a mediator between a patient and a family, other team members and departments. In order to perform this function the nurse have to advocate on behalf of a patient (Ronnebaum & Schmer, 2015). The patient is vulnerable in what concerns his or her personal safety,
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In most cases, patients cannot determine the expediency of the treatment imposed be a doctor as they cannot completely understand the meaning of their diagnosis, its risks and potentials. In this way, the main task of the nurse is to provide complete and honest information about his state removing useless worrying, about possible choices of treatment and to support the patient in his or her decisions.
Being a client’s advocate, the nurse must be wide-awake and take appropriate actions regarding any instances of unethical, unprofessional or even illegal practices by any healthcare team member or the healthcare system itself (Ronnebaum & Schmer, 2015). It is worth mentioning that patient’s privacy and safety put the nurse in the doctors’ opposition.
It is obvious that there are more positive consequences of nurses’ advocacy for the clients than for the nurses themselves. On the one hand, the patient’s rights are protected by all possible means. Moreover, according to the Provision 3, a client can rely on nurse’s help in making decisions in a way to full recovery (Kibble, 2012). On the other hand, the nurse is constantly experiencing moral dilemmas as he or she is under the risk of being accused by colleagues. The Ethical Code gives top priority to the patient, whereas collective solidarity threatens to initiate a conflict which can lead to a loss of