Ethical Issues In Nursing

INTRODUCTION

Nurses a one of the health service providers and members in health systems that are responsible for giving care to the clients and patients based on ethical issues.

They need ethical knowledge to conduct their appropriate function to manage situations and to give safe and proper legal and ethical care in today’s changing world.

With regard to practical care, they always try to answer the question of “what can I do? Whereas they should try to answer what is essential to be done for the patients in the context of ethical principles.

Ethics seek the best way of taking care of the patients as well as the best nursing function.

Nurses are responsible for their clinical function, and their main responsibility is to take care of

AND / OR was used combination and collection of various key words together. A manual search was also adopted and the references of the articles were studied as well. The search yielded about 82 articles whose titles and abstracts were studied. The articles not meting the inclusion criteria were left out. Inclusion criteria were: articles published in English or Persian and those articles on nursing ethical values in patient’s care. At this stage, 37 articles were excluded and45 were selected and comprehensively reviewed. In the next stage, the articles were completely studies with regard to inclusion criteria and their answers to the questions of the present

Pang (2009) stated nursing professional values in seven themes of altruism; care, respecting the dignity, trust, accountability, independency, and justice. Mahmoodi (2008) indicated responsibility, having mental and emotional communication, value, and ethics criteria such as honesty in work, mutual respect, religious margins and confidentiality, justice and fairness. Shaw (2008) and Fahrenwald (2005) in our studies, in a different way, investigated application of five nursing professional values in nursing eduation, including altruism, independency, and respect to dignity, nursing interventions’ integrity, and social justice. Horton (2007) stated that personal and organizational values, have effects on nursing and introduced values such as responsibility, honesty, patients’ participation, integrity and humanity protection, patients’ independency, deep humanistic relationship, dignity, hope passion, teamwork, differentiation, versatility, altruism, nurturing, integrity and support, reciprocal trust, sound knowledge, clinical competence, communications, unity, homogeneity, coordination, self-sacrifice and devotion, self-protection, privacy preservation, creativity, aesthetics, management, economizing, braveness, commitment, ethical attitude, personal orientation, judgment, freedom, individualism,