Ethical Issues Paper Ethical Issues NURS 710: Nursing Leadership Role and Ethics in Complex Health Care Systems

 Today in healthcare, it is crucial to have ethical values. Ethical values are general rules of behavior that offer a useful foundation for recognizing what kinds of actions, intentions, and motives are valued (Haddad & Geiger, 2020). Ethics can also be defined as moral beliefs that oversee how the person or group of people will act or handle themselves (Haddad & Geiger, 2020). It is critical to consider correct and incorrect actions and also include the determination sequence to decide the definitive penalties of them. In healthcare, ethical values are imperative to have because professionals need to identify predicaments, make good judgments and decisions based on their values while keeping within the laws that govern them (Haddad & Geiger, 2020). Included in this paper is an ethical incident, principles of justice used to make the decision, principles that should have been used to make the decision, and how this incident has impacted my personal nursing practice. The Ethical Incident A 65-year-old man was admitted for an elective left total knee arthroplasty. The patient had a significant past history of alcohol abuse and reported taking five shots of vodka per week and drinking a few drinks of vodka per day. Patients with a history of long-term, heavy alcohol consumption will experience some degree of withdrawal when alcohol use is stopped (Wood et al., 2018). After the patient received his surgery, the doctors were monitoring him, expecting him to be discharged the next day. The next morning during change of shift, the nursing staff found him on the floor very confused and agitated. Signs of alcohol withdrawal include diaphoresis, tremors, tachycardia, hypertension, hyperthermia, and disorientation (Wood et al., 2018). The medical doctor had then put in place the CIWA protocol. If left untreated, approximately one- third of patients with withdrawal symptoms can progress to delirium tremens (Wood et al.,