My Nursing Ethics Essay

What personal, cultural, and spiritual values contribute to your worldview and philosophy of nursing? How do these values shape or influence your nursing practice?
Just as encountering illness and suffering often triggers hunger for spirituality, the latter is one part of my personal knowledge that I use to base my worldview as a nurse on. Spirituality helps to address the patients’ needs in a holistic manner, considering the purpose and meaning of human existence and the meaning of human suffering. It helps to address not only physical but also spiritual needs of a patient. While sharing the search for meaning in life in patients and understanding their inner changes as a result of quest for spirituality, the nurse helps to establish the sense of peace, life purpose, and communion (Andrist, Nichoals, & Wolf, 2006, p. 153). Here peace is understood as inner harmony, sense of purpose emerges from contemplating the meaning of life, and communion is related to a person’s relation to a larger whole. As a Christian, I base my spirituality knowledge on the foundations of the Christian religion in the Bible.My Nursing Ethics Essay

The cultural value that I will definitely apply to my practice as a RN is my respect, openness, and understanding of other cultures. Encountering new patients every day, the nurse should be able to positively react to different cultures and take into account their practices, diet, or childbirth, etc. My cultural belief is rooted in Christian belief that all people are equal before God, so I do not distinguish between races of ethnicities. This will help to closely collaborate with the patients no matter what their culture is.My Nursing Ethics Essay

Define values, morals, and ethics in the context of your obligation to nursing practice. Explain how your personal values, philosophy, and worldview may conflict with your obligation to practice, creating an ethical dilemma.
The common definition of ethics as “the philosophical study of right action and wrong action” applies to nursing practice (Lachman, 2005, p.3). Within the system of my personal values and worldview, ethics performs the role of moral framework which guides my professional activity. Ethics is the highest standard of moral behavior. Moral values, which form the basis of the individual’s ethical conduct, are understood as evaluative judgments about “good” and worthy things or actions. Apart from personal values, nurses should also have professional values. A combination of these will help to apply moral reasoning – in other words, reasoning centered on ethical or moral issues (Butts & Rich, 2012). Moral reasoning will help to solve the upcoming dilemmas in nursing.My Nursing Ethics Essay

Being a nurse, I realize that I will need to solve ethical dilemmas often. The most problematic issues involve the issue of life and death, the question of patient’s rights, and confidentiality questions (Lachman, 2005, p.3).