Ethical Issues

Ethical Issues


Patient Advocacy and Autonomy

Autonomy, patient advocacy and informed consent: Health professionals should work towards providing and increasing autonomy of patients by giving them information which will enable the patients to make their own decisions. Patient autonomy enables a patient to participate in the decision making process. This helps in increasing mutual respect and trust in a doctor patient relationship. With patient autonomy when it comes to Nurse they have to respect the patient due to the fact that it goes with ensuring their health (Rahmani, 2010). In regards to the patient the Nurses should make sure that they pay attention to everything when giving information and that they should want the patients to be involved when it come to decision making. (Rahmani, 2010).
Patient advocacy is concerned with the advocacy for patients and survivors. Patient advocacy includes activities like patient rights, informed consent, creation of awareness, support for the survivors. Informed consent is a person's agreement to let something happen in the context of his or treatment like surgery. There has to be a complete disclosure of risks as well as the benefits of the treatment. Informed consent establishes a legal duty for the healthcare provider towards disclosure of material facts. Also, Patients need for nursing interventions demonstrated significant positive correlation with respecting to their autonomy and perceived health status had a significant negative correlation with respecting to their autonomy. This result showed that if patients’ health become worsen, their viewpoint about respecting to their autonomy would be better. It means that whenever contacts between patients and nurses increase, the perception of patients regarding respecting to their autonomy would be better and closer with nurse's perception. Present study suggested that there were statistical differences between viewpoints of nurses and their patients in medical-surgical wards...

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