Nursing’s Code of Ethics, Essay Example

6.2  All nurses, regardless of role, have a responsibility to create maintain, and contribute to environments of practice that support nurses in fulfilling their ethical obligations.  This may be the most difficult and dangerous area of a nurse’s working life. It concerns both the physical environment and the moral and disciplinary one too. Often it is the newest nurses who are most aware of shortcomings in these areas. That is because more experienced people on the staff may have gotten used to the way things are done, even when those ways may be harmful to patients or staff members. The reason for these shortcuts might be described more or less like this: We don’t have time for a lot of stuff here. People get used to taking shortcuts. Opportunities are everywhere, because if you do less at one procedure, you can do more at two, and maybe they are more important. But usually it is a lot of little things, from not washing hands enough to wearing a tie or anything else that will be a path of infection to and from a patient.

6.3  As with concerns about patient care, nurses should address concerns about the health care environment through appropriate channels. “Appropriate channels” is key. It seems that in workplaces that are based on rank — for example, hospitals (doctors, nurses, orderlies), prisons (warden, guards, trusties), the military (officers, non-commissioned officers, enlisted) — you will often find codes of silence. That’s because each department or group within the workplace becomes a kind of subculture ruled by rank. That subculture will have its own rules that might conflict with the larger needs of the workplace and society. Going against your own subculture can be dangerous to your career. And yet if something goes wrong because you broke a hospital rule because “we don’t have time for that stuff here,” you might very well lose your job. Being a nurse means knowing that you cannot always follow the rules. Sometimes there really isn’t time for a lot of procedural stuff. But nursing also means taking a stand when you see something that violates your sense of duty. That takes courage, which makes its own time.