Legal and ethical challenges in discharging a patient
Introduction
Over 35 million patients are discharged from the hospital annually in the United States. Hospital discharge is a complex procedure.1) Oftentimes, making appropriate discharge decisions are challenging to the health care workers and can cause many issues related to ethical, legal, clinical and financial aspects. The three common situations such as patient discharging against medical advice, patient staying against medical advice, and family insists on unsafe discharge make hospital discharge process difficult. 2) The problematic discharge situations impact the patient and the hospital negatively by partially treated illnesses and increasing health care costs due to readmissions. Legal and ethical aspects of discharging a hospitalized patient can be discussed with examples below.
Discharge against medical advice – (DAMA) Discharge against medical advice – (DAMA) is when a hospitalized patient decides to leave the hospital before the treating doctor actually writes discharge order. Leaving the hospital without the doctor advice results in partially treated illness, health
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Handling ethical dilemmas is time consuming, yet critical process. Ethical situations create undue pressure for experienced as well as new nurses. Nurses face several stressful ethical situations almost everyday especially those who work in critical care areas. Nurses work hard to provide effective care by following code of ethics. Ethical situations are at times extra intimidating for the international nurses. Periodical training of policy and procedures, knowing about their support groups will help the nurses to encounter the ethical situations with