Principles of Healthcare: Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-Maleficence, and Justice

Ethical Concerns in Nursing.
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Whether an individual is a doctor, a health care administrator or a nurse, working in the health care industry does not only have its numerous benefits, but it is also highly challenging. This is in the sense that the basic medical procedures, the primary and complicated treatments and the methods used, all have their own specific merits and demerits. Moreover, patients have their rights and considerations pertaining the kind of care that they are ought to receive from the facility. The four principles of health care ethics were created and developed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in 1985. These principles are; autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. This text seeks to use the scenario of Alison to identify, examine and evaluate two of the four principles of ethical concerns in the field of health care because the principles are a significant necessity for consideration of particular practices in the health care service provision profession.
The ethical principle of autonomy obliges that the patient have autonomy of thought, intention and action when choosing the recommended health care procedures and making decisions on the same. Therefore, in this context, the art of decision making, according to the principle, should be free of condemnation, coercion and coaxing (Macklin, 2017). The principle demands that nurses inform the patients of all the benefits and risks of the procedure so as to enable make the most standardized and appropriate decisions. On the other hand, the principle of justice states that the benefits and risks of a new experimental procedure be fairly and equally distributed throughout the society. The principle requires that the implications and obligations of the new procedure be in full compilation with the laws of the land and are recognized and informant to all the members and parties in the community (De Roubaix, 2018). The principle ensures distribution of resources through notions of rights and requirements, meeting needs overall legislation.
The principle of beneficence states that the health care provider must ensure that they do well to the patient at any given time. Even if it is a new procedure, the principle obliges that the procedure should be operating with the intent of fulfilling the good expectations of the patient. Further, the principle has some particular demands such as maintaining skills and knowledge and regularly informing the patient of the positive side of the practice and striving to benefit from each action (Carter & Gordon, 2017). In this context, in the scenario of Allison, when she had decided that she would store all the records of her second year exchange programme in a photo journal, it was her responsibility to ensure that all her actions are intended for the good and benefit of the patient or patients. Moreover, although Alison obtained a verbal consent from the patient to document her findings in form of their photos, it is evident that they did not allow her to post their pictures on social media.
The ethical concerns raised in this scenario are that, according to the principle of beneficence, it was wrong for th...