Ethical Dilemma Regarding Nursing, Essay Example

While not employed as a nurse myself, I had occasion to be drawn into what was to me a troubling issue. For several months I volunteered at a local hospital, serving in a ‘candy striper’ role. My goal was to gain firsthand experience in the field, in order to better determine if nursing was the career I would want to pursue.

In the course of my service I became acquainted with a female patient who was recuperating from a radical hysterectomy. The woman was in her thirties and the operation, mandated by cancerous growth in her uterus, had been successful. Her length of stay was as yet undetermined. As part of my rounds, I visited with her daily, often detained by her desire for company.

It soon became apparent to me that the patient seized every opportunity to complain about the hospital conditions and her treatment there. She found the nursing staff disagreeable, unhelpful, and slow to respond when she called for pain medication. As I was not a nurse, the woman felt free to fully express her discontent to me, and her particular complaint was that she believed she was being ignored as a nuisance when she signaled for nursing assistance. Whether her complaints were justified or not, I realized that the patient’s distress was very real.

On one occasion during this time I was at the nurses’ station, assisting in data entry and taking part in the general conversation. The woman called to the desk for a nurse to attend her and there was an immediate reaction at the station; the nurses began to laugh, express shock, and generally deride the patient as a complainer who would never be appeased. I was directly told by one senior nurse that, in these cases, the best thing to do was “let her sit for a while.” It was ten or fifteen minutes before a nurse actually visited the woman, although several could have responded immediately.

My dilemma was in understanding that this patient most likely required no real help, yet I felt that it was the job of the nurses to check in, regardless. I saw that this sort of patient behavior could easily be tiresome but I could not get past my conviction that, again, the patient had a right to be seen.

Reporting this lack of interest to the patient herself did not seem an option. Rather, that would have been destructive gossip. I considered speaking to the attending physician, yet I was concerned about injuring the status of the nurses who were, by and large, professional and caring. The fact remained, however, that, in a very real sense, the patient was correct; she was intentionally being disregarded.

By way of resolving this dilemma, I asked to speak to the senior nurse. I expressed my concerns and the patient’s increasing complaint level. This nurse listened attentively, then assured me that she and her colleagues would properly attend to the woman. I had the impression that this nurse was concerned more with possible repercussions to herself and the other nurses, than with accommodating the patient. This troubled me but I determined that, as long as the issue was resolved and the patient would receive more rapid responses to her calls, the actual motivation of the nurses was unimportant. What mattered was that the patient could feel she was being properly attended to, and that I was able to step in and alter the situation without going over anyone’s head and causing trouble. I felt this resolution was an effective middle-ground step, and one that addressed the circumstance with no negative consequences.