Considering the fact that social care is provided to a huge number of people across the world, ethical issues are cetain to arise. The chosen setting of social care for this report is nursing home. Nursing homes provide short-term rehabilitative residence after a major illness, surgery or injury that requires occupational therapy, physical therapy or speech therapy. In this report, a meeting is held by the management of X Nursing home in order to discuss the bellow mentioned incidents that have imposed a negative impact on the service users of the mentioned nursing home. Firstly, a staff member of the nursing home had refused to clean the room of a gay individual since it was against his religion. Secondly, an elderly client was found to be abusive towards black and Asian staffs. Thirdly, the head office manager has complained about the untidiness in the staff area. Finally, two co-workers were found to debating about the effectiveness of beating a child and letting old and lonely people suffering from dementia die without treatment.
Ethical values offer a framework for the assessment of the behaviour in a specific nursing home. Healthcare service users in Nursing Home are responsible for providing care to the healthcare service users based on ethical issues (Shahriari et al. 2012). It is highly crucial that they have ethical knowledge that will enable them to conduct the appropriate function in order to manage the ethical situation and provide proper and safe ethical as well as legal care in the changing world of today. The X Nursing Home should be highly committed to integrity, excellence and ethical behaviour in order to enhance the quality of life of the employees as well as the healthcare service users. The commitment of the health care providers of the nursing home should base on incorporating the mission, core values and principles of service in everything they perform. This includes building effective relationships with the healthcare service users, employees and their families along with the team members and business partners. The 10 most crucial ethical values that should be underpinned in the care setting of the mentioned nursing home include human dignity, justice, autonomy in decision making, privacy, accuracy in caring, human relationship, commitment, sympathy, honesty and finally individual and professional competency (Padela et al. 2012). Human dignity is one of the most crucial ethical values which must be incorporated in the X Nursing home. Respecting an individual includes respecting his cultural values and ethnicity irrespective of his sexual orientation, race or gender. The absence of this ethical value among the healthcare service providers as well as the healthcare service users results in various issues. For instance, lack of respect towards other is evidenced by the healthcare service provider who discriminated and refused to clean the room of an individual based on his sexual orientation. Moreover, insulting staffs of the X Nursing home based on their cultural identity can be considered as another negative impact of lack of Human Respect and dignity (Rider et al. 2014). Respect towards the dignity of service users includes maintaining privacy during the clinical procedures and having a proper understanding of the requirements of the patient’s requirements. Social Justice is another ethical value which is highly crucial in the nursing profession. The concept of social justice deals with the equal opportunity of all individuals to avail healthcare service and the right of getting treated fairly irrespective of their economic, cultural and social status. Another mention-worthy ethical value in the nursing profession includes Autonomy in decision making. This ethical value allows the healthcare service users to decide whether they want to accept the suggested treatment, care or interventions or not (Holloway and Galvin 2016). According to this ethical value, healthcare service providers should inform patients appropriately about their diagnosis, prevention and treatment at each step so that they can make an effective decision.
As being discussed earlier, several cultural, religious ethical factors affect the behaviour of one individual towards other. The possible factors that have influenced the ethics and values held by the individuals involved in the four mentioned incidents are as follows.
Individual factors
The ethical behaviour of an individual gets highly affected by several individual factors that include knowledge, personal goals, morals, values and personality. More is the information gathered by an individual about a particular subject, the more ethical decision is made by him (Trong 2012). For instance, in the mentioned nursing home, two of the employees were found to be discussing child beating. According to them, the act of child beating is justified since it will make them disciplined and obedient. They were also found to be debating about whether money should be invested in the treatment of elderly people who has dementia or not. The subject of their discussion clearly points out the lack of knowledge and morals.
Values, on the other hand, can be defined as the standard of behaviour and judgment capabilities of an individual. Values highly affect the behaviour of an individual. People having low values often tend to perform the unethical act in the workplace just to gain financial or competitive advantages (Patterson et al. 2016). On the contrary, people who have high value perform ethical acts even it has temporary risks or difficulties associated with it. For instance, the manager of the X Nursing home pointed out the untidiness of the area where staffs reside since it depicts the lack of care provided to the staffs of the organization. This act may result in an enhancement in the costs of the organization but will eventually help the staffs to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Social factors
Cultural norms, religious beliefs, financial condition, friends and families and society in which an individual resides are three of the crucial social factors that affect the ethical behavior of an individual. However, these factors along with the individual factor together helps an individual to determine his ethical action. People who lack knowledge often found to believe in several illogical religious and cultural norms (Monteverde 2014). For instance, one of the staffs of the mentioned nursing home has refused to clean the room inhabited by a gay healthcare service user. The reason stated by him when asked was that that interacting or serving an individual who is homosexual is prohibited in his religion. From his statement, it can be understood that superstitions related to his religious belief are the crucial reason behind his action. Religious beliefs and cultural norms vary from place to place. Lack of cultural competency and knowledge about the ethical values while dealing with homosexual individuals can be regarded as two of the chief reason behind this unethical behaviour.
The society also imposes a high impact on the ethical behaviour of an individual. An individual who grows up in a society where people of a certain group or ethnic background are discriminated often found to develop low ethical value (Cobb, Puchalski and Rumbold 2012). For instance, in the mentioned nursing home, an elderly healthcare service user is found to abuse healthcare service users who have black or Asian background. One of the chief reason behind this unethical act of the mentioned individual includes he grew up in a period when racial discrimination was predominant in the United Kingdom.
The above-discussed incidents are imposing a highly negative impact on both the healthcare service users as well as employees of the organization. Hence the management of X organization should implement the following strategies to eradicate the above-discussed issues.
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that it is highly crucial for the healthcare service providers to have effective ethical values in the workplace. Having high ethical values can prevent a lot of issues which results from unethical behaviour or act performed by healthcare service providers. However, educating healthcare service users about the importance of ethical behaviour is also important to enhance the overall quality of service of the health care homes.
References
Cobb, M., Puchalski, C.M. and Rumbold, B. eds., 2012. Oxford textbook of spirituality in healthcare. Oxford University Press.
Holloway, I. and Galvin, K., 2016. Qualitative research in nursing and healthcare. John Wiley & Sons.
Monteverde, S., 2014. Undergraduate healthcare ethics education, moral resilience, and the role of ethical theories. Nursing ethics, 21(4), pp.385-401.
Padela, A.I., Gunter, K., Killawi, A. and Heisler, M., 2012. Religious values and healthcare accommodations: voices from the American Muslim community. Journal of general internal medicine, 27(6), pp.708-715.
Patterson, F., Prescott-Clements, L., Zibarras, L., Edwards, H., Kerrin, M. and Cousans, F., 2016. Recruiting for values in healthcare: a preliminary review of the evidence. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 21(4), pp.859-881.
Rider, E.A., Kurtz, S., Slade, D., Longmaid, H.E., Ho, M.J., Pun, J.K.H., Eggins, S. and Branch, W.T., 2014. The International Charter for Human Values in Healthcare: an interprofessional global collaboration to enhance values and communication in healthcare. Patient education and counseling, 96(3), pp.273-280.
Shahriari, M., Mohammadi, E., Abbaszadeh, A., Bahrami, M. and Fooladi, M.M., 2012. Perceived ethical values by Iranian nurses. Nursing ethics, 19(1), pp.30-44.
Trong Tuan, L., 2012. Corporate social responsibility, leadership, and brand equity in healthcare service. Social Responsibility Journal, 8(3), pp.347-362.
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