Free Custom «Nursing Questions» Essay Paper

Florida State through its rigorous Board of Nursing has developed various reasons to revoke, suspend or reprimand a nurse from practicing his/her profession. The reasons include: any attempt by any member to use, or be seen to use a certificate or license that is under suspension or facing revocation orders; a deliberate attempt by any member to employ unlicensed nurses; provision of false information to influence issuance of certificate. In my own opinion, these reasons are sufficient enough as they touch on issues of integrity and public safety, Kudos to the Florida Act (McCloskey et.al, 1996).

Registered nurse (RN) is the face of medication in the hospital. Some of the responsibilities assigned to RN that I was not aware of include maintaining effective communication between the hospital and patient’s family members or relatives, and actively engaging in events of public nature. Besides RN, NPA has devised a set of limitations to nurses under LPN. For instance, nurses under LPN are not allowed to carry out any blood administration in the hospital, have restricted handling of wound care/dressing and restriction on IV medical administration on patients. These violations have not been witnessed in my hospital in any way (McCloskey et.al, 1996).

Ethical Dilemma:

Regarding ethical dilemma, I do agree that it is a phenomenon that I encounter more often than not. I have been able to meet head on with life threatening patient decisions. For instance, I recently came a cross a situation where the mother refused certain medication for her daughter. This was really heartbreaking. Faced with the dilemma, I reported the scenario to hospital management who had to act fast and swiftly. Besides their action, I employed a frame work for ethical decision making which has eight components of describing the problem, identification of ethical issue in the problem, among others. My outcome from the framework actually correlates positively to my earlier instinct that ethical problem had occurred (Parsons, 1999).

Professional liability insurance:

One advantage of this insurance scheme to a nurse is that, it gives the nurse the opportunity to voluntarily lower his/her premium costs. This is perfectly viable so long as the nurse together with hospital management sets out proper working conditions that lower rate of risks. On the other hand, the scheme poses a great problem to the nurse because of his or her inability to control cost determining factors. Factors such as state laws, nurse’s financial position all affects the cost but the nurse seems to have no control over them (Parsons, 1999).

Confidentiality:

In everyday nursing practice, malpractice, which is an ethical dilemma, requires four functionally related elements to show its occurrence. The four elements are; duty, breach, cause and harm. Duty is the obligatory standard set by the management or professional body to be achieved by all the nurses. For ethical dilemma to occur, the second element, breach, must be affected. That is, sufficient grounds must be identified to show that breach or violation of duty has occurred. To give the whole situation more density, the breach affected must be a recipe for harm in the hospital. Lastly, the whole arrangement must result in harm to the stakeholders of the arrangement (McCloskey et.al, 1996).

Nursing Documentation:

Proper documentation methods that have been used in my hospital fall under two broad categories; documentation by induction and documentation by inclusion. Within the two broad categories, three subsets have stood out. These are focus charting, narrative documentation and SOAP/SOPIER. Focus charting is fundamentally used by the nurses to discern a particular focus based on the patient’s concerns. SOAP/SOAPIER charting on the other hand, is used as a problem solving mechanism, where all problems the nurse faces are identified and listed down. Lastly, narrative charting which stems from the word “narration” is used to record all nurse interventions and their subsequent effect on client outcomes (McCloskey et.al, 1996).

Nursing Organization:

American college of Nurse Practitioners is the organization that suits my interest most in this particular case. One of the critical parts of the college’s ethical dimension is its mission. The mission of the organization is to ensure that there is stable and sound policies that makes it possible for all nurses to continue delivering quality services at all times. Such health dimensions are further reinforced in the policy agenda 2012 of the organization.