Assignment: Practicum Journal Entry: Analyzing an Ethical Decision

Journal Entry – Analyzing an Ethical Decision
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Subject and Section
Professor’s Name
March 9, 2020
Every day, health practitioners experience several circumstances that would require their independent judgment. While most of these might be easily answerable, some of them require serious consideration in order to avoid an ethical problem or any future repercussions. In this paper, the author would like to discuss one of the ethical issues that psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNP) face in their daily lives – the need for autonomy and informed consent to treatment. This includes the decision-making process that they are required to take when choosing between effectively treating or informing the patient. Nonetheless, the author believes that knowing the guidelines of decision-making and following them strictly would help in resolving these dilemmas.
Patient Autonomy and Need to be Informed
Although patient autonomy is one of the essential aspects of a patient’s treatment, complying with the requirements of informed consent is significantly more complicated when dealing with those in the psychiatric ward. For one, patients with mental illnesses have a huge possibility of not being able to give consent, nor even understand the treatments being done to them. What is also surprising is that in a recent study done by Hem, et al. (2018), would show that there is still a lack of literature with regards to the idea of balancing the right of the patients to their autonomy and using “coercion” as a means of implementing treatment procedures for the patient. Additionally, the author stresses that there is a need for better research and understanding of the subject matter, especially considering that nurses who implement these treatments are subjected to a high degree of moral and ethical distress (Hem et al., 2018).
State Healthcare Laws and Regulations
In order to help deal with these kinds of issues, Chicago’s Department of Mental ...