Ethical Issue That Affects the Performance of Nurses in Their Work Environment and How Leadership Styles Facilitate the Dilemma Encountered at Work

On the other hand, nurses are expected to fulfill other roles including respecting the rights and dignity of patients. As such, as nurses try to accomplish their duties and display respect for the dignity and right of patients they face various dilemmas. Nurses experience situations in which conflicts arise as a result of differences in approaches utilized to promote health and the need to show respect to the patients. This essay describes an ethical issue that affects the performance of nurses in their work environment and how leadership styles facilitate the dilemma encountered at work. Nurses have numerous responsibilities that the care facilities expect them to accomplish while following a set of principles and codes aimed at promoting the quality of healthcare.

If nurses opt to utilize medical practices that have not been established in healthcare, they are considered to be violating the ethical principles of their profession. Thus, the nurses are supposed to apply the acceptable medical procedures to administer treatment to a patient. Further, nurses should rely on the clinical courses of action acceptable within healthcare. On the contrary, in many cases, patients tend to reject any medical advice given to them by the nurses. Thus, nurses are forced to encourage the patients to consider the medical advice being given in the care facility. Assuming that the treatment does not work and ends up harming the patient, the care facility is exposed to legal complications such as lawsuits and fines from the patient and the medical society.

Thus, any decision leads to legal or ethical complications. When the nurses chose to make the patient happy by showing respect for human right and dignity, they expose the care organization to legal complications if the treatment approach chosen by the patient fails. On the other hand, a decision to follow the established and acceptable medical procedures will provide positive outcome on a patient’s health but can lead to ethical complications resulting from violating the human right and dignity of the patient. My Role as an Advocate Effective leadership styles in the care facility can help facilitate the ethical dilemma that limits the capacity of nurses to fulfill their roles and responsibilities (Curtis, de Vries, and Sheerin, 2011). As such, my leadership style is more of a facilitator rather than a barrier to the dilemma.

Conclusion In today’s healthcare setting, various principles have been established to guide nurses and all practitioners on how to accomplish their duties of promoting health and eliminating the suffering of the patients. On the contrary, despite these principles, nurses face ethical dilemmas more often as they try to accomplish their roles. For instance, the nurse control versus patient freedom is a common dilemma that tends to crop up as the practitioners try to implement the established medical procedures that patients end up rejecting. However, nurses have been able to overcome the dilemmas by making decisions believed to provide the best outcome for the organizations and the patients. Transformational leadership in nursing practice. British Journal of Nursing, 21(20), 1212-1218. Lo, B. , & Ovid Technologies, Inc.