In this assignment, you will be given a medical scenario where you will be challenged to make the right decision. It is important that you interact with this scenario with complete honesty. The point of this exercise is to discover how you will grapple with accountability in your own medical career and the careers of others. Once you are done with the scenario you will write a short (two to three pages) paper describing how you would maintain accountability within a medical organization. What are some of the incentives you would offer and what are some of the punishments violators would experience? What are some ideas that you have to keep your staff ethical and effective? What specific biblical principles support your proposed accountability process within the medical organization?
Please use the following scenario:
While working as a nurse at a very busy acute care hospital you find yourself in the following situation. You have been pulling four days of twelve hour shifts and on your last day you are covering for four more hours due to another nurse calling in. You are caring for six patients who all require various levels of pain management. Exhausted from the day, your supervisor calls and tells you that your relief has arrived in the parking lot. Your priority now is to finish your shift tasks so you can finally leave. You administer an opioid to one of your patients when another patient begins to have a seizure. Your team stabilizes the patient and looking up you see that your relief is here and you hand over your charts, do a quick briefing, and leave for the night.
The following day you are told that one of your patients went into cardiac arrest due to a reaction to the opioids they were given. They are now stable and should recover with no issues. However, as you read their chart you realize that you had given them opioids but did not document it and then your relief gave them another dose of opioids since they believed it had not been done by you. You have been a nurse for many years and you know both the importance of documentation and you have a pretty good idea of the consequences for not doing so. This now leaves you with a choice.
The patient is now fine and will completely recover. In fact, there is no investigation and if you do not say anything no one will know. You can simply go about your day as if nothing happened. So, what is the right thing to do? More importantly what will you do? Now before your Christianity and ethical opinion of yourself automatically kicks in, take time to reflect on some of your moral failings. All of us have done things that we are not proud of, things that we deeply regret and are ashamed of. Take time and reflect on why did you take those actions? Why did you make that decision? Could you make a similar mistake in this situation? What could keep you from doing the right thing and why? What would motivate you to do the right thing and why?