INCOMPETENCE

For an ethical issue to occur, certain choices must be made, and these particular choices are not clear or
ideal to the perspective of the specific individual. One major problem facing the medical fraternity is
incompetence in nurses.

Incompetence
 refers to the lack of ability or lack of an individual nurse to practice and fully exercise any
professional registered nurse's learning skills and care (Fukada,2018).
 Although a nurse is registered, if in the performance of her duty she manifests incompetency,
there is ground for revocation or suspension of her certificates of registration.
 Incompetence results in a decline in the quality of patient care or even cause moral distress,
which may affect a nurse's functional capability in duty.
 Incompetence sometimes can be viewed as a nurse having knowledge of what she is supposed to
do but not being allowed to do it due to circumstances such as doctor’s instructions that may be
biased or the nurse's mere ignorance of the task hand.

Examples of nurses showing incompetence:

 An incompetent nurse may fail to monitor a patient due to personal reasons, which may lead to
fatal consequences as the patient may develop complications that may lead to fatalities.
 When it comes to a situation where a nurse was incompetent due to a lack of proper equipment to
use during a dire situation, this becomes an ethical dilemma. Since the nurse is to be blamed for
incompetence and simultaneously, it seems wrong as the proper nursing equipment to save the
patient was not available.
 Also, in other instances, some nurses lack adequate knowledge on particular health care and
either decide to follow their conscience on the little they know or ask for help from their fellow
nurses. This also promotes incompetence as co-workers face an ethical dilemma as to report or
not, and any decision they take has consequences to either patients or the individual nurse.
 In clinical judgment, a nurse shows incompetence with the use of faulty/poor (erroneous,
incomplete, inappropriate for situation) clinical judgment.