Week 5: Analyzing An Ethical Decision

In your role as a PMHNP, you will encounter several situations that will require your ability to make sound judgments and practice decisions for the safety and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. There may not be a clear-cut answer of how to address the issue, but your ethical decision making must be based on evidenced-based practice and what is good, right, and beneficial for patients. You will encounter patients who do not hold your values, but you must remain professional and unbiased in the care you provide to all patients regardless of their socio-demographic and ethnic/racial background. You must be prepared to critically analyze ethical situations and develop an appropriate plan of action. For this Assignment, you review the literature and discover the various ethical dilemmas PMHNPs encounter and how these issues are typically addressed in your state.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

· Analyze salient ethical issues in psychiatric mental health practice

· Compare ethical dilemmas with state health laws and regulations

· Analyze ethical decision-making processes

To prepare:

· Review literature for moral/ethical issues encountered by a PMHNP.

· Select one of the articles you found that was published within the last 5 years to use as a focus for this assignment.

Write a 2-page paper in which you do the following:

· Summarize the moral/ethical issue in the article (no more than 1 paragraph).

· Describe the moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding the issue.

· Analyze the ethical issue and compare them to the state health laws and regulations in your state.(Texas)

· Outline the process of ethical decision making you would use to address this ethical dilemma.

Note: Be sure to use the Practicum Journal Template, located in this week’s Learning Resources.

see class rules

Use subheadings when writing

cite scholarly resources including peer-review journals and current practice guidelines

A clear purpose statement (The purpose of this paper is to…) is required in the introduction of all writings

Please all bullets points, bold, red and highlighted area must be attended to.

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.