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ethical nursing practice

ethical nursing practice!



Ethical Nursing PracticeNURSES ARE experts on death. Or so many nurses would claim. While doctors legally certify that death has taken place, nurses are the ones who are there for the dying person and their family. Ethical nursing practice includes the prevention or delay of death. In very rare cases, nurses retrieve people from death. When death is inevitable, they prepare the person for the best possible death. Once death has occurred, nurses carry out rituals of care on the body. Nurses and doctors do not always agree on death practices. Nurses see themselves as more accepting of death; its naturalness and inevitability. They also see themselves as advocates for people to die in the way they choose, if at all possible. Nurses and doctors do not carry out death practices in isolation. Professional standards guide individual practice. Legal structures exist to monitor and sanction their work. The media helps to form public opinion regarding nurses' and doctors' practices. Public surveys suggest that nurses are more highly respected than doctors. Unfortunately, respect for the person and their work is not the same thing as respect for the knowledge they are assumed to hold. While nurses may think they are the experts on death, this view is not generally shared by doctors or members of the public. Nor is it shared by the creators of legal structures regarding death practices. Hence there is a danger that legal and social judgements about nurses' death practices are based on ill-informed assumptions about nurses' knowledge and morality.