Nursing Code Of Ethics Explained | NurseJournal.org (2024)

FAQs

What is Code of Ethics in nursing in simple words? ›

Being an advocate and protecting the rights and safety of their patients. Providing optimal care for patients in need, and assuming accountability to provide the best care possible. Safeguarding their own health, safety, and integrity as a nurse. Promoting ethics and integrity in the workplace.

Nurses have four fundamental responsibilities: to promote health, to prevent illness, to restore health and to alleviate suffering. The need for nursing is universal. Inherent in nursing is a respect for human rights, including cultural rights, the right to life and choice, to dignity and to be treated with respect.

Provision 9 The profession of nursing, collectively through its professional organizations, must articulate nursing values, maintain the integrity of the profession, and integrate principles of social justice into nursing and health policy.

A code of ethics is a guiding set of principles intended to instruct professionals to act in a way that aligns with the organization's values and benefits all stakeholders. A business's code of ethics is drafted and tailored to the specific industry at hand, and it requires all business employees to adhere to it.

Ethical nursing practice is based on the belief that nurses have a professional and moral obligation to provide care that is in the best interest of their patients. This care includes protecting patients' rights, providing competent care, and maintaining patient confidentiality.

Nurses are advocates for patients and must find a balance while delivering patient care. There are four main principles of ethics: autonomy, beneficence, justice, and non-maleficence. Each patient has the right to make their own decisions based on their own beliefs and values.[4]. This is known as autonomy.

Accountability

Accountability is chief among the ethical principles in nursing. Each nurse must be responsible for his or her own choices and actions in the course of patient care. Nurses who hold themselves accountable often provide higher-quality patient care.

Nonmaleficence: The avoidance or minimization of harm. Nonmaleficence in nursing requires the provision of safe, effective, high-quality care. Examples of nonmaleficence in nursing include holding a medication due to adverse reactions or taking steps to ensure a safe work environment.

First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.

Why is Ethics important in nursing? ›

The Nursing Code of Ethics has allowed nurses to become confident in the care that they are providing. By giving nurses a set of ethical principles and standards to adhere to, they can easily make morally-sound decisions for their patients, ensuring that they get the best possible care.

The generic definition of beneficence is an act of charity, mercy, and kindness. It connotes doing good to others and invokes a wide array of moral obligation. Beneficent acts can be performed from a position of obligation in what is owed and from a supererogatory perspective, meaning more than what is owed.

If a nurse or other medical professional violates the code of ethics, then they can be subject to license discipline and even revocation. A violation can also lead to civil or criminal liability, depending on the facts and circ*mstances.

The nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, including the responsibility to promote health and safety, preserve wholeness of character and integrity, maintain competence, and continue personal and professional growth.

Provision 7: The nurse, in all roles and settings, advances the profession through research and scholarly inquiry, professional standards development, and the generation of both nursing and health policy. All nurses can participate in the advancement of the profession.

Nursing ethics is the applied discipline that addresses the moral features of nursing practice. It is a subset of health care ethics or bioethics. Three dimensions of nursing ethics interrelate as they prescribe ethical norms, describe ethical aspects of nursing, and generate ethical guidance.

The nurse promotes, advocates for, and strives to protect the health, safety, and rights of the patient. The nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, including the responsibility to preserve integrity and safety, to maintain competence, and to continue personal and professional growth.

The best description of a code of ethics is this: it is a document that permits others to know what principles guide professional decision making. Essentially, it is an established guide that delineates the standards of conduct expected within a particular organization or profession.

Care ethics stem from the idea that care is basic to human existence. Caring weaves people into a network of relationships (Vanlaere & Gastmans, 2011). However, when a person chooses to be a nurse, he or she has made a moral commitment to care for all patients.