Writing Assignment 3

Nursing Research

NUR 3130-8516

Desiree Grenade

New York City College of Technology

Spring 2012

Ethics is defined as the discipline of dealing with what is good and bad and also deals with moral duty and obligation. As humans, we face ethical issues in our daily lives and in nursing research,  the topic of ethics plays a significant role in the way we treat and care for our patients. This paper summarizes two articles, both which deal with ethics and the role that it plays in nursing research. To find these articles, I used the database CINAHL Plus with Full Text with the keywords “ethics in nursing research” and received a total results of 648 hits, which was much more than I had anticipated.

One of the article is from the Health Science Journal and is entitled “What are the Major Ethical Issues in Conducting Research? Is there a Conflict between Research ethics and the Nature of Nursing”? It is written by Georgia Fouka and Marianna Mantzorou. This article focused on the most important ethical issues in conducting research. Those mentioned were, informed consent, beneficence, respect for anonymity and confidentiality, respect for privacy and the vulnerable groups of people. The authors then spoke about each in detailed and mentioned the importance of each.

Informed consent means that a person knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently gives his or her consent. Clear disclosure, comprehension, competency and voluntariness are the four main parts of an informed consent. Beneficence or to do no harm, relates to the benefits of the research. According to the authors, a researcher must consider all possible results of the study and balance the risks with equal benefit. If the risks supersedes the benefits, the study should then be revised. The respect for anonymity an confidentiality must be in place to protect participants. With this, subjects are free to give and withhold whatever information they may choose. The respect for privacy ties in with confidentiality and this means that crucial measures has to be done to protect participants from potential physical, psychological or social dame during the research.

Last the authors spoke about the groups the were vulnerable to research studies. These groups included prisoners, mentally ill, elderly persons, children, poor, and critically ill or dying. Researchers must take careful considerations before ejecting or accepting any vulnerable groups for research. Although the above mentioned are critical in ethics and nursing research, the authors pinpointed possible conflicts that nurses have to deal with, when undertaking or participating in research. They concluded that though nursing has the roles of caring, advocating, preventing harm and protecting dignity of the subjects involved, the nature or actual reality of nursing is sometimes contradicted with the ethics of research.

The second article I chose, I enjoyed reading and thought it was very insightful. The title is “Ethics, culture and nursing practice in Ghana” written by Donkor and Andrews and was retrieved  from the nursing journal International Nursing Review. This article was actually a study that was performed to describe how nurses in Ghana approached ethical dilemmas. The authors of this article felt that nursing practice in international settings must meet international ethical standard in promoting health, preventing illness, restoring health ad alleviating suffering. As nurses, we are always thought to take ones’ culture into consideration when performing care and this article proves just that.

The study was a qualitative descriptive design. There were 200 Ghanian nurses who participated in the study by completing a questionnaire which included questions on ethical dilemmas and coping with them. The questions were based on the four sections of the ICN Code of ethics (Nurses and people, Nurses and practice, Nurses and the profession and Nurses and co-workers) and the five ethical principals of non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy, social justice and confidentiality. They were asked to circle one of three answers; agree, indecisive or do not agree. The goal was to highlight the contradictions between the cultural beliefs in Ghana and the ICN international code of ethics for nurses.

For example, a patient has just had a diagnosis of leukemia, but the nurses and doctors keep the truth from him and rather tell the patient that further test will be done and he should not worry. This showed the dilemma between the nurse and the people. Now, the Ghanian culture believes that when patients are told about their serious conditions, they might die sooner while the ICN Code says that ” The nurse’s primary professional responsibility is to people requiring nursing care”. The answer that most of the nurses should have picked for the dilemma was “I don’t agree” and although 61 percent did, 31 percent chose “I agree” which showed there was indeed a cultural belief that the patient was not psychologically ready to accept the truth. Nine questions that were based on each of the ICN’s Code of ethics and the five ethical principals of ethics were asked in total.

The results of the study showed that nurses’ approaches to the ethical problems do not always coincide with the ICN Code for Nurses and universal ethical principals. While some cultural beliefs were in sync with the ICN Code, others were in much conflict with them. Therefore, this implies that for nurses, there has to be a balance between their professional ethical knowledge base and cultural values and beliefs.

Both of these articles were similar in many ways. They both aimed at identifying situations that hindered the correct usage of ethics in nursing research. Nurses face situations daily in which they constantly have to make ethical decisions and when they make that decision, though other factors may have an effect, it should be the professional code of ethics that is used as the foundation to facilitate that decision.

References

Donkor, N., & Andrews L. Ethics, culture and nursing practice in Ghana. International Nursing Review, 58(1), 109-114. doi:10.1111/j.1466-7657.2010.00852.x

Fouka, G., & Mantzorou, M. (2011). What are the Major Ethical Issues in Conducting Research? Is there a Conflict between Research ethics and the Nature of Nursing?. Health Science Journal, 5(1), 3-14.

Polit, D. F., & Beck, C. T. (2010). Essential of nursing research: Appraising evidence for nursing practice (7 ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins.