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Professional Ethics and Patients' Rights: Past Realities, Future Imperatives
Author(s) -
Johnstone MeganJane
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
nursing forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.618
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1744-6198
pISSN - 0029-6473
DOI - 10.1111/j.1744-6198.1989.tb00827.x
Subject(s) - patients' rights , health professionals , professional ethics , patient rights , patient advocacy , health care , nursing ethics , nursing , relation (database) , political science , human rights , engineering ethics , medicine , law , psychology , medline , database , computer science , engineering
The nature and application of professional ethics in relation to patients’ rights is not always clearly understood by healthcare professionals. As a result, patients’ rights are not always respected or upheld in a way that they ought to be. An undersirable consequence of this has been that patients have suffered otherwise avoidable harms. The issue of professional ethics and patients’ rights is one of concern to all healthcare professionals. It is of particular concern to nurses since they are the ones who are often caught in situations involving abuses of patients’ rights. This paper briefly examines the failure of professional ethics to prevent patients’ rights’ abuses in healthcare contexts. It also makes recommendations on how the nursing profession could respond to this problem.