Article Summary and Review: Legal and Ethical Issues

Legal and Ethical Issues
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Legal and Ethical Issues
Identify primary areas for oncology nurses' legal and ethical issues in this study (Park, 2009) and strategies they may have developed to work with those ethical issues.
Every profession presents its employees with some ethically challenging situations that force people to make tough decisions. Without an in-depth understanding of a situation and ethics education, a person will likely make the wrong choice. As per the document under study, nurses' ethical and legal issues in their profession can be divided into three categories, including end-of-life issues, human rights issues, and patient care issues. Within these broad categories are smaller issues that end up making the nursing profession incredibly difficult. However, it is crucial to note that these categories capture the entire nursing profession. For oncology nurses only, Park (2009) mentions “advance directives, do-not-resuscitate orders, documentation and patient privacy, informed consent, medication errors, and pain management.” Despite the above issues, nurses are still expected to perform at the highest level. Patients’ expectations never dwindle due to the above, which adds to the pressure for nurses to do the right thing while also trying to maintain patient satisfaction levels.
As per the study, some of the issues that seemed common for nurses were mainly found in the patient care and human rights issues categories. Regarding patient care, some of the issues nurses encountered included conflicts that strain nurse-doctor relationships, incompetence, staffing patterns that infringe on patients’ care, and lack of adequate resources (Park, 2009). On the other hand, some of the ethical issues as...