Introduction
In today’s health care system, the quality and delivery of nursing care are influenced by the development of technological support which also contributed some patient to accomplish a better quality of life, while for others it prolonged their distress. Nurses’ main responsibility is to manage situations and to give safe and proper legal and ethical care by using their ethical knowledge. Perrault, 2008 defines ethics as a branch of philosophy dealing with what is morally right or wrong. It also helps to maintains standard of care provided. Nurses come across several ethical problems in the line of nursing practice. An alertness of essential ethical concepts helps nurses to use reason to work through these problems (DeLaune & Ladner, 2002).
This essay is based on a case scenario of an older woman, who has been considered as an addict and is prescribed a pain treatment of alternating a weak analgesic with a placebo. A placebo is sham medication (often take the form of sugar pills, saline injections, or minuscule doses of drugs) or procedure designed with no beneficial effect based on their physical or chemical properties (American Society for Pain
…show more content…
The real cause of injury or ‘but for’ need to be proven, that is the action of the person had caused the injury (Mikos-Schild, 2008). As in this scenario the inaction of the nurse to manage the patient pain caused the suffering (Dalaika’s has been deprived from her sleep, food and she is not able to perform her activities of daily living) of the patient. Physician order was administer a placebo alternating with low dose analgesic; the nurse has neglected the patient’s need for the pain medication by following this order. In addition the nurse failed to maintain her standard of care as she did not assess and evaluate patient’s pain in her plan of care (Turton,