Summary: Professional Misconduct In Nursing

Introduction Nursing in its entire essence is not only a profession per se but is actually a vocation. A humbling and a rewarding profession that needs a good heart to be able to perform and needs a degree of commitment, discipline and responsibility not only for oneself and also for others. As nurses place value on their commitment to serve, they are also bounded by the profession to be accountable and responsible of ones actions. There is that moral aspect that nurses owe to themselves, to their colleagues and to the community they serve. All nurses same as with other professionals, undertake their practice in accordance to a code of ethics and legal practice which is acceptable to the norms of service to the society. There are

They should do all things right in all aspects and to abide by the bylaws set by the profession to promote and protect the safety of their clients. So when nurses do an act that is a breach in the ethical standards of care then it is called professional misconduct (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2014). Nowadays as nurses respond to different situations their job scope has increased and so are the number of misconduct cases filed against nurses. These misconduct are of many forms and of different degree of severity, all hounding the integrity of the nursing profession therefore it is important to further understand what is professional misconduct, discuss an example of it by citing a clinical scenario that have happened and its’

First, SN Jo admitted to have falsely recorded the respiration rate of the patient. Recording a false assessment is a serious documentation error and is unethical. The ethical value of veracity which is the practice of telling the truth, is breached which is an absolute no to the nursing goals. Truth telling is an important function of the nurse and the act of falsifying document is dishonesty which is a lack of respect to the patient and to the profession, According to Jameton (1984), deceiving others constitute unnecessary assumption of responsibility so when unfortunate events occur the one responsible for the deception which in the case here is false documentation will be liable for the consequences. Though in the scenario it was not mentioned what the effects were of the false documentation in relation to patients’ condition the nurse must actually carry out the assessment and monitoring and in the event harms come to the patient as a result of the failure to do proper documentation of assessment the nurse will be held liable. In cases of lawsuit for malpractice, negligence among others documentation is a very crucial towards the end results. Next, SN Jo gave insulin because of a high range result without bothering following some