Nurses face complicated situations daily as they work with peoples’ health and experience humans’ various characters, views, and tastes. During the week five practice, I encountered two more difficulties nurses struggle with throughout their employment: getting injured at work and making ethically correct choices. Nurses are taught to be accurate and cautious not to harm their health; that is why they should perceive every patient as potentially infected with any possible uncurable disease. However, any nurse is a human and still can make a mistake such as a needlestick injury. The health risk nurses face at work can put under question their health safety and lead to relevant consequences.
Even an experienced employee can make an error due to stress, lack of sleep, and other conditions. The injury from contaminated needlestick might infect medical workers with blood-transported viruses depending on circumstances, and the viral load received. The most frequent injuries are estimated to be from hypodermic injections with one-use syringes (Cooke &Stephens, 2017). To reduce the risk of needlestick injections, every clinic should insert staff training and provide health workers with a better schedule preventing their stress and lack of sleep due to overworking.
Nurses oftentimes struggle with ethical choices as some of them might contradict on special occasions. For instance, such ethical principles as autonomy and non-maleficence might oppose on occasions when a patient makes a choice that can harm his condition. Then, a nurse faces difficulties in decision-making, willing to save the patient’s rights and prevent worsening of his health at the same time. Moreover, another ethical concern for nurses is a conflict of interests (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2016). Sometimes a nurse can struggle between self-benefit and a patent’s health. Various companies may pay nurses for promoting special drugs during a presentation (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2016). Ethical principles should overweight any personal interest even though nurses are a part of the current system that makes medicine rather a custom to a client than health providing to those in need. To avoid that, several limits should be put on advertisement actions in the medical sphere.
References
Cooke, C. E., & Stephens, J. M. (2017). The clinical, economic, and humanistic burden of needlestick injuries in healthcare workers. Medical Devices (Auckland, NZ), 10, 225-235.
Stanhope, M., & Lancaster, J. (2016). Public Health Nursing: Population-Centered Health Care in the Community (9th ed.). Elsevier Mosby.