According to ANA (10), professional nursing refers to the act of protecting, promoting, and optimizing health and nursing abilities in a bid to prevent illnesses and injury, alleviate suffering through diagnosis, managing human response, and advocating for care of individuals, families, communities and populations. Deontological ethics guide physicians and doctors in upholding moral principles and recommending for guidelines that stem for decisions that can be adopted for any identified single case. The principle of autonomy is an ethical practice where nurses and physicians respect and uphold the rights of the patients as long as the opportunity will not infringe into the rights of other human beings (Lee 466).

Both nurses and physicians deal with moral issues and dilemmas on a daily basis. These range from distributive justice physicians sign on prescriptions to discussing and balancing complicated issues engaging patients with terminal diseases by nurses and physicians alike. These situations are challenging and perplexing to both the nurses and the physicians (Epstein & Turner 1). In both professions, ethics play significant roles in stripping away emotional responses and finding solutions to immediate problems. Even though these ethics are valuable in managing human experiences, both professions ascertain that operating with minimal or absence of emotional response is perceived as dangerous (Dimick 1). Emotional reactions are thus useful in eliminating human perceptions and making the professionals sensitive to particular situations. Due to the roles each profession performs on a patient, it is at times difficult for the nurse to comply with the standards, as they are especially the last in the profession to deal with a patient.

 Several instances may compel a nurse to breach societal ethics and for the sake of a patient (Ramesh 240). In cases where seeking advanced medical attention may be a privilege than a right, a nurse may break the institutional policies to save the health of such a patient. In events of triage patients, all the health professionals are to come together and salvage the situation by assisting the neediest patients with the available medical resources. The code of ethics in medicine guides professionals on labeling patients from the worst conditions. One unresolved dilemma the professionals are to face in such a situation is to ignore a patient nearby to assist another patient in events of limited care.

References

American Nurses Association (ANA). Nursing’s social policy statement: The essence of the

profession. ANA Publishing: Silver Spring, MD. 2010

Dimick Chris. “Ethical Dilemmas” Journal of Ahima. 2011. 

Epstein, Beth & Turner, Martha. “The Nursing Code of Ethics: Its Value, Its History” OJIN: The

Online Journal of Issues in Nursing. 2015. Vol. 20, No. 2, Manuscript 4

Lee H. Christopher. “Disaster and Mass Casualty Triage.” AMA Journal of Ethics. 2010. 12 (6):

466-470

Ramesh C. Aruna. “Triage, Monitoring, and Treatment of mass casualty events involving

chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents.” J Pharm Bioallied Sci. 2010. 2 (3):239-247