NHS FPX 5004 Assessment 4 Section 2: Ethics and Experience
I have been a labor and delivery nurse in a Catholic hospital for the past two years, and every day I deal with situations that provide moral challenges, like caring for patients who are being threatened with abortions while still having a heartbeat. Because this hospital is a house of worship, medical staff members are expected to abide by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) proscription against abortion (Holmes et al., 2021). This clause frequently results in patients bleeding excessively or becoming infected while the medical staff waits for the heartbeat to stop. The medical staff at the hospital only permitted the doctors to induce labor when the patient was in danger of going into shock.
It is shocking that the majority of healthcare organizations supported this decision, claiming that the pregnant person and her healthcare provider have the final say over whether to end the pregnancy. Such a situation is devastating, particularly for the patient and the healthcare team (Yasin et al., 2023). One year prior, a patient with a preterm premature rupture of the membranes (PPRM) came to our facility at 21 weeks of pregnancy. Despite the fetus’s continued heartbeat, a bedside ultrasound showed that the uterus’s amniotic fluid was dry and incapable of supporting life. In other hospitals, this calls for prompt labor induction, but healthcare staff must wait for authorization to induce labor in a Catholic hospital.
Every five hours, the midwife collected blood samples from the patient for vital signs, and every six hours, the unborn heart was examined. After 19 hours, the patient began to have painful cramping that appeared to be an infection but was unable to push the fetus out. After the midwife performed an ultrasound while I was away and found no evidence of a baby heartbeat, I was approved for labor induction. But the patient had already begun to experience intraamniotic infection, and the delivery occurred later.
Little fetal heartbeats could be heard when the patient was holding the child. Our actions were in accordance with the American Nurses Association, the American College of Nurse-Midwives, the Association of Women’s Health Obstetrical and Neonatal Nurses, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, despite the fact that they went against Catholic beliefs (Megregian et al., 2020).
Effective leadership strategies are produced by using the LEAD framework (Lead, Engage, Achieve, Develop, and Succeed) as a healthcare leadership model. But in this instance, as the judgments were being made externally, this method was not used. Nonetheless, my decision to remain silent and wait to see if the fetal heartbeat was compliant with the following nursing ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence, justice, and nonmaleficence:
- Autonomy: The patient chose to terminate the pregnancy after learning that there was no more amniotic fluid, but her request was denied in accordance with hospital policies (Jia et al., 2021).
- Beneficence: It went against this principle to continue the pregnancy because it was dangerous because of significant bleeding, infections, suffering, or death (Ray, 2023).
- Justice: According to this notion, everyone should receive services in a fair and equal manner. Although it is permissible to induce patients experiencing pregnancy complications like these, the patient had been denied the opportunity to receive justice due to the teachings of the church (Sperling, 2020).
- The principle of nonmaleficence forbids healthcare providers from purposefully causing injury or suffering to their patients. According to Hong et al. (2021), the woman would have had more serious outcomes if she had continued the pregnancy.
References NHS FPX 5004 Assessment 4 Self-assessment of Leadership, Collaboration, and Ethics
NHS FPX 5004 Assessment 4: Holmes, W., Porayska-Pomsta, K., Holstein, K., Sutherland, E., Baker, T., Shum, S. B., Santos, O. C., Rodrigo, M. T., Cukurova, M., Bittencourt, I. I., & Koedinger, K. R. (2021). Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 32(1), 504–526. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-021-00239-1
NHS FPX 5004 Assessment 4: Holmes, W., Porayska-Pomsta, K., Holstein, K., Sutherland, E., Baker, T., Shum, S. B., Santos, O. C., Rodrigo, M. T., Cukurova, M., Bittencourt, I. I., & Koedinger, K. R. (2021). Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 32(1), 504–526. Place your order