Ethical Implications of Inadequate Nurse Staffing

Ethical Issue
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Abstract
Ethics are vital to the integrity of the nursing profession. It guarantees better patient-centered care in the health sector. On daily occurrences, nurses face complex questions on medical treatment and how to deal with ethical dilemmas appropriately. They learn to respond to conflicting issues through years of training, experience, and patient interactions. The best way to respond to a moral issue in nursing is by reviewing the American Nurse Association's code of ethics to determine a solution to a unique situation (Zhang et al., 2018). If nurses do not adequately handle ethical issues, the result could be tense clinical relationships, a decline in patient care, moral distress, legal issues, and burnout. This write-up will explore the ethical implications of inadequate nurse staffing and the social, ethical, political, economic, moral, healthcare, societal, and legal aspects of nursing task force shortage. Additionally, the paper will explore the ethics of nursing shortage according to an ethical dilemma decision-making model. It also analyzes the nursing role as a change agent in serving God and humanity.
Introduction
Nursing ethics are beliefs, rules of conduct, core values, and principles deemed essential for licensed nurses. The persistent shortage of nursing staff across medical facilities challenges the beliefs and values of the nursing profession. A nurse's obligations are not limited to patient care. They also include adherence to legal and ethical standards and maintaining appropriate relationships and boundaries with colleagues. Due to insufficient staffing, many nurses find it challenging to carry out their moral obligations of providing quality patient care. Inadequate staffing leads to massive patient workloads for available nurses, working for longer hours, and increased risk of personal injury. Due to taskforce shortages, nurses often complain of job dissatisfaction, burnout, legal implications, and moral distress, leading to poor patient care quality (Milliken, 2018). They end up in a dilemma whereby they must decide to either care for patients or their own needs. This scenario often leads to high job turnover rates across the healthcare sector. Many facilities have ethics committees that guide nurses when dealing with ethical issues. The guidance includes defining the problem's moral dimensions, applying ethical principles to the situation, searching for professional codes for advice, generating possible solutions, taking action, and evaluating results to improve future decision-making.
The Social, Ethical, Political, Economic, Moral, Healthcare, Societal, and Legal Aspects of the Nursing Taskforce Shortage
Ethical issues vary significantly. Most conflicting situations are rooted in inadequate nurse staffing, quality patient care, protecting patients' rights, and advanced decision-making. The healthcare aspect of the nursing shortage ethical issue is poor patient care because the hospital assigns nurses to care for several patients. According to the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, a limited nursing task force increases patient mortality due to little maintenance during hospital stays (Milliken, 2018). One moral obligation nurses must fulfill is protecting their patients from harm. In this aspect, the hospital sets unrealistic goals for patient care, especially in cases requiring specialized care.
Regarding the moral aspect, healthcare providers working in inadequate staffing experience distress. They feel they are compromising their ethical duty of providing the utmost care to patients by offering inadequate care. In some situations, nurses make medical errors that result in further complications, leaving them in mental anguish because they believe they would have done better. Additionally, they can only provide mandatory patient care, such as injection and monitoring but lack time to provide additional care, like taking patients out for a walk and holding personal conversations.
The legal implication of the nursing shortage problem is that the public can easily access data concerning the inadequacy of patient care, leading to neglect related to personal injury tort. People then use these claims to trigger lawsuits despite the absence of other viable healthcare issues (Milliken, 2018). The healthcare sector has received subsequent lawsuits relating to negligence claims associated with low staffing levels with matters relating to death, injuries, residents wandering, and bedsores. In most cases, the court awards victims of the occurrences large settlements, making it an expensive affair for the hospital and healthcare providers.
Additionally, constant ethical conflicts at the workplace drain nurses physically, socially, and mentally, resulting in burnout. Nurses tend to patients' needs and fulfill their moral obligations, leading to physical exhaustion and job dissatisfaction. Even though some hospitals provide overtime pay that caters to the technical aspect of nursing care, they forget about care ethics, which requires meaningful patient care.
Implication and Ethics of Nursing Shortage
The ANA code of ethics provides several provisions that are continually updated to reflect diverse perspectives, changes in research, law, and emerging issues. The code is helpful in the current healthcare environment. It reinforces a nurse's fundamental values and duties, the boundaries of responsibility, and obligations beyond patient encounters. The ANA code of ethics has four principles and nine provisions that guide nurses through their nursing practice (Fowler, 2018). Additionally, the four principles of nursing practice that guide nursing practice include autonomy, which means that each patient has the right to make their own decisions based on their beliefs and values. In this case, the nurse must respect the patient's right to refuse medications, surgery, or other medical interventions. The second principle is nonmaleficence, which simply means do not harm. It requires nurses to decide on medical interventions that can be beneficial without causing harm. The third principle is beneficence. It entails actions guided by compassion and prioritizing patient-centered care. In the justice principle, patients have a right to equitable and fair treatment by pushing for equitable healthcare and advocating for health programs for all populations.
Nurses work for longer hours and additional shifts that strain their physical ability to perform, which results in adverse patient outcomes because many honor their duties to their patients. They follow the second ANA code of ethics provision, which states that a nurse should be solely committed to the patient. Therefore, their commitment to pati...