Capella Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Decisions Oral Presentation Assignment
Question Description
Create a 15-minute oral presentation (3–4 pages) that examines the moral and ethical issues related to triaging patients in an emergency room.
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and assessment criteria:
Competency 1: Explain the effect of health care policies, legislation, and legal issues on health care delivery and patient outcomes.
Explain the health care policies that can affect emergency care.
Recommend evidence-based decision-making strategies nurses can use during triage.
Competency 3: Apply professional nursing ethical standards and principles to the decision-making process.
Describe the moral and ethical challenges nurses can face when following hospital policies and protocols.
Explain how health care disparities impact treatment decisions.
Competency 4: Communicate in a manner that is consistent with expectations of nursing professionals.
Write content clearly and logically, with correct use of grammar, punctuation, and mechanics.
Correctly format citations and references using APA style.
Working in an emergency room gives rise to ethical dilemmas. Due to time restraints and the patient’s cognitive impairment and lack of medical history, complications can and do occur. The nurse has very little time to get detailed patient information. He or she must make a quick assessment and take action based on hospital protocol. The organized chaos of the emergency room presents unique ethical challenge, which is why nurses are required to have knowledge of ethical concepts and principles.
Questions To Consider
To deepen your understanding, you are encouraged to consider the questions below and discuss them with a fellow learner, a work associate, an interested friend, or a member of your professional community.
How does a triage nurse decide which patient gets seen first?
How does health disparity affect the triage nurse’s decision making?
What ethical and moral issues does the triage nurse take into account when making a decision?
What are triage-level designations?
Resources
SUGGESTED RESOURCES
The following optional resources are provided to support you in completing the assessment or to provide a helpful context. For additional resources, refer to the Research Resources and Supplemental Resources in the left navigation menu of your courseroom.
Capella Resources
APA Paper Template.
APA Paper Tutorial.
Library Resources
The following e-books or articles from the Capella University Library are linked directly in this course:
Tingle, J., & Cribb, A. (Eds.). (2014). Nursing law and ethics (4th ed.). Somerset, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Cranmer, P., & Nhemachena, J. (2013). Ethics for nurses: Theory and practice. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
Aacharya, R. P., Gastmans, C., & Denier, Y. (2011). Emergency department triage: An ethical analysis. B MC Emergency Medicine, 11(1), 16–29.
Guidet, B., Hejblum, G., & Joynt, G. (2013). Triage: What can we do to improve our practice? Intensive Care Medicine, 39(11), 2044–2046.
Kangasniemi, M., & Haho, A. (2012). Human love – The inner essence of nursing ethics according to Estrid Rodhe. A study using the approach of history of ideas. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 26(4), 803–810.
Gastmans, C. (2013). Dignity-enhancing nursing care: A foundational ethical framework. Nursing Ethics, 20(2), 142–149.
Domagala, S. E., & Vets, J. (2015). Emergency nursing triage: Keeping it safe. Journal of Emergency Nursing, 41(4), 313–316.
Course Library Guide
A Capella University library guide has been created specifically for your use in this course. You are encouraged to refer to the resources in the BSN-FP4006 – Policy, Law, Ethics, and Regulations Library Guideto help direct your research.
Internet Resources
Access the following resources by clicking the links provided. Please note that URLs change frequently. Permissions for the following links have been either granted or deemed appropriate for educational use at the time of course publication.
American Nurses Association. (2015). Ethics and Human Rights. Retrieved from https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/nursi…
American Nurses Association. (2016). Position statement: The nurse’s role in ethics and human rights: Protecting and promoting individual worth, dignity, and human rights in practice settings. Retrieved from https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/nursi…
Vigil, J. M., Alcock, J., Coulombe, P., McPherson, L., Parshall, M., Murata, A., & Brislen, H. (2015). Ethnic disparities in emergency severity index scores among U.S. veteran’s affairs emergency department patients. PLoS One, 10(5). Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26024515
Assessment Instructions
Your supervisor has asked you to do a 15-minute oral presentation at a staff meeting about a recent issue that occurred at another hospital in town. Following an industrial accident, two patients arrived at the emergency room of that hospital at the same time, presenting with very similar inhalation injuries. The hospital received a great deal of negative press due to how the patients were triaged in the ER. Your supervisor would like you to use the specifics of this case to review triage procedures and best practices at your facility. Here are the details:
One is a 32-year-old firefighter, Frank Jeffers, who is presenting with respiratory difficulties that he obtained while evacuating victims of an industrial accident. He is a married homeowner and father of two young boys. He has lived in the community all his life. He has full and comprehensive health insurance through his employer.
The other is Brent Damascus, a 58-year-old man. Brent is presenting with respiratory difficulties with the same intensity as Mr. Jeffers above. He is well known at the hospital emergency room, as he is a frequent visitor with various complaints, including asthma, headaches, and tremors. He is homeless, unemployed, and uninsured. He stays many nights at the YMCA and eats lunch at the soup kitchen. He has lived in the community for over 10 years and has been arrested several times for petty theft.
PREPARATION
Search the Capella library and the Internet for scholarly and professional peer-reviewed articles on best practices in triage nursing. You will need at least three articles to use as support for your work on this assessment.
DIRECTIONS
Create a 15-minute presentation (3–4 pages) that examines the moral and ethical issues that occurred when triaging these two patients and the best practices for managing this in the future.Divide your draft into a number of talking points that you can summarize neatly. Keep in mind that an oral presentation requires slightly different language than an essay. The aim is to communicate your message so keep sentences simple and focus on the key points you want to deliver. Address the following in your presentation:
Explain the health care policies and protocols that are in place that direct triage care in an emergency situation.
Explain how health care disparities impact treatment decisions.
Identify the health care policies that are in place that direct care for uninsured individuals. Is there a difference in how these individuals are triaged?
Describe the moral and ethical challenges nurses can face when following hospital policies and protocols. Is there a conflict when a severely injured person is also uninsured?
Recommend evidence-based strategies that should be applied for managing the care of uninsured and indigent population.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS
Your presentation should meet the following requirements:
Written communication: Written communication should be free of errors that detract from the overall message.
References: Include a reference section with a minimum of three references; a majority of these should be peer-reviewed sources. All resources should have been published within the last 5 years.
APA format: Resources and citations should be formatted according to current APA style and formatting.
Length: 3–4 typed, double-spaced pages, excluding title page and reference page. Use Microsoft Word to complete the assessment.
Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12-point.
Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Decisions Scoring Guide
VIEW SCORING GUIDE Use the scoring guide to enhance your learning. How to use the scoring guide
Also Read:
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
The Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) is the highest level of nursing practice for nurse leaders. The DNP improves patient outcomes and puts research findings into practice. They specialize in providing evidence-based practice information. They also provide quality improvement, system leadership, and other critical nursing services. The DNP is intended for nurses seeking a terminal degree in nursing practice and serves as an alternative to doctoral programs focused on research. DNP-prepared nurses are well-prepared to fully implement the science developed by PhD, DNS, and other research-focused nursing doctorates. 2022) (DNP facesheet).
The desire to apply theory and develop formal research programs, to become nursing faculty, to combine clinical practice and formal research, and to advance through professional leadership in hospitals and health systems organizations. The Phd focuses on research and philosophy, and graduates are more likely to be considered nurse scientists who conduct research and use evidence-based practice.
If I had to choose between the two, I would definitely go for the DNP rather than the PhD. Both appear to be very interesting and to have different areas of knowledge, but DNP would be my choice without a doubt.
In their 2010 report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended that nurses’ education be increased, with a focus on increasing the number of nurses with baccalaureate degrees and doubling the number of nurses with doctoral degrees (Melnyk, 2013). In the United States, there is still some confusion about the roles of PhD and DNP. Endpoints for these programs are distinct. The PhD degree prepares researchers and scholars to generate external evidence to advance science and theory while also guiding practice. The DNP degree, on the other hand, prepares expert clinicians to prepare internal evidence and translate evidence generated through rigorous research into practice in order to improve health care quality, patient outcomes, and organizational and health policy (Melnyk, 2013). The DNP focuses on providing leadership for evidence-based practice in the real world (EBP). DNP graduates will seek roles as educators, but the emphasis should be on advanced practice specialization rather than the teaching process.
If given the opportunity to advance his nursing career, this writer will pursue a DNP. There is far too much time and schooling required to complete a PhD degree at his age. Given my age, this writer may not be able to enjoy and share the learned experience for long. The writer is also still completing his BSN deree and may require a break. The writer’s ambition is to work as a consultant. He enjoys working with EBPs and developing policies to aid in risk management assessment and prevention.
LopesWrite Policy
For assignments that need to be submitted to LopesWrite, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.
Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.
Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?
Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.
Late Policy
The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.
Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.
If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.
I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.
As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.
Communication
Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:
Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.
Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.
