The ICN Code of Ethics for Nurses

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Code of Ethics for Nursing Students and for
Nurses
Dr. Aidah Alkaissi An-Najah National
Univrsity Faculty of Nursing
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Ethics of Nursing

• Ethics includes values, codes, and principles
  that govern decisions in nursing practice and
  relationships
• Nursing Ethics is the discipline of evaluating
  the merits, risks, and social concerns of
  activities in the field of nursing
• Ethical principles are necessary to guide to
  professional development

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Code of Ethics for Nursing Students Code of
Academic and Clinical Conduct

• The code of Academic and Clinical conduct is
  based on an understanding that to practice
  nursing as a student is an agreement to uphold
  the trust with which society has placed in us

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A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

• Advocate the rights of all clients
• Maintain client confidentiality
• Take appropriate action to ensure the safety of
  clients, self , and others
• Provide care for the client in a timely,
  compassionate and professional manner

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A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

• Communicate client care in a truthful
• Promote excellence in nursing by encouraging
  lifelong learning and professional development

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A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

• Treat others with respect and promote environment
  that respects human rights, values, an choice of
  cultural and spiritual beliefs
• Collaborate in every reasonable manner with the
  academic faculty and clinical staff to ensure the
  highest quality of client care
• Use every opportunity to improve faculty and
  clinical staff understanding of the learning
  needs of nursing students

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A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

• Encourage faculty, clinical staff, and peers to
  mentor nursing students
• Refrain from performing any technique or
  procedure for which the student has not been
  adequately trained
• Refrain from any deliberate action or omission of
  care in the academic or clinical setting that
  creates unnecessary risk of injury to client,
  self or others

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A CODE FOR NURSING STUDENTS

• Assist in ensuring that there is full disclosure
  and that consent is obtained from clients
  regarding any form of treatment or research
• Abstain from the use of alcoholic beverages or
  any substances in the academic and clinical
  setting that impair judgment

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Beneficence means doing or promoting good in
  such a manner as to safeguard and promote the
  interest and well being of patients and clients
• Nonmaleficence means to avoid doing harm, to
  remove from harm, and to prevent harm
• Harm can be physical and so include pain,
  disability, discomfort and death but it can also
  be psychological and thus include mental stress

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Autonomy and consent Principles of self
  determination
• The cardinal principles of autonomy
• The right to full disclosure- the right to know
• The right to privacy
• The right to receive care and treatment
•  

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Justice The principle of fairness is the basis
  for the obligation to treat all clients equally
  and fairly
• Veracity telling the truth. Clients prefer to
  receive accurate information about their
  conditions and prognosis even when the outlook is
  bleak

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Privacy
• To ensure that the patients body is appropriate
  covered
• To establish a culture of privacy to ensure that
  personal information of patients is kept as
  private as possible

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Confidentiality
• To preserving the human dignity of patients
• Discussing clients outside the clinical setting,
  telling friends or family about clients, or even
  discussing clients in the elevator with other
  workers violates client confidentiality and must
  be a voided

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Responsibility A nurse, who neglects to give a
  patient pain relief can be said to have caused
  that patient harm
• Proving negligence (i.e. that the nurse is
  legally responsible)
• It is not only human beings who can cause
  something to happen, since conditions (e.g. staff
  shortages, poor equipment, inadequate resources,
  and so forth) may also cause accidents or result
  in a patient being injured

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• Accountability
• Is about justifying actions, explaining why
  something was (or was not) done
• The purpose of calling people to account for
  their actions is therefore to establish whether
  they had good enough reasons for acting in the
  way they did

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Principles of Health Care Ethics

• FIDELITY
• The professionals faithfulness or loyalty to
  agreements responsibilities accepted as part of
  the practice of the profession

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Be competent in your practice

• The nurses are always responsible for their
  behaviours
• Has to refuse to perform procedures for which
  they havent been prepared
• Ignorance isnt a legal defence. Neither will
  lack of sleep or overwork be accepted as a legal
  reason for carelessness about safety measures or
  mistakes

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The ICN- Code of Ethics for Nurses (2006)

• Nurses have four fundamental responsibilities
• To promote health
• To prevent illness
• To restore health
• To alleviate suffering

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The ICN Code of Ethics

• Nursing care is respectful of and unrestricted by
  considerations of age, color, creed, culture,
  disability or illness, gender, sexual
  orientation, nationality, politics, race or
  social status

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NURSES AND PEOPLE

• The nurse shares with society the responsibility
  for initiating and supporting action to meet the
  health and social needs of the public, in
  particular those of vulnerable populations
• The nurse also shares responsibility to sustain
  and protect the natural environment from
  depletion, pollution, degradation and destruction

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NURSES AND THE PROFESSION

• The nurse is active in developing a core of
  research-based professional knowledge
• The nurse, acting through the professional
  organization, participates in creating and
  maintaining safe, equitable social and economic
  working conditions in nursing

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Future ImplicationsPlease take with you home and
discuss it with your colleagues

• Scientific research over the past two decades has
  resulted in rapidly developing technology,
  greatly altering health care and medical and
  nursing practice
• Research has forced health care providers to
  address such issues as
• Who should receive the benefits of technology
• What are the long-term results of life-supporting
  and life-extending procedures
• What kind of future generations we are preparing

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Future Implications

• Having addressed these issues, can we say that
  our decisions are ethical?
• What will be the ultimate cost in consumer
  health?
• What will be the actual cost to society?
• Where do nursing responsibilities lie?

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Future Implications

• To ensure the best possible consumer health care
  in the future, physicians and nurses will have to
  forge a closer, more collegial relationship
• Such a relationship will demand a high order of
  ethical and professional obligation

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Thank You
Thank You
ICN