Tag: ethics

The importance of moral courage

In an article out last week, bioethicicsts Alyssa Burgart and Holly Tabor discuss the recent Covid-19 outbreak and the moral courage shown by frontline healthcare professionals. Moral courage, or “the ability to take action for moral reasons, despite the risk of adverse consequences ” has been paramount to the response to this outbreak. Were it…

A first of many ethical problems

One of the earliest ethical problems I encountered in acute care, and one I often use for educational purposes, involved a woman I'll call Linda. Linda had end-stage liver disease (ESLD for short) and had been admitted for failure to thrive due to poor nutritional intake and concurrent hepatic encephalopathy. She was listed for transplant...

Why ethics?

(or, why such a big topic for a DNP project instead of something “easy” like increasing STD screening or reducing inappropriate use of antibiotics?) Well, the short answer is that it became very obvious to me that the ethics education I got in nursing school was not nearly enough to prepare me for the ethical…