Informed Consent as an Ethical Issue in Nursing

Introduction

Population health majors in the collective health situation of a particular group of people mainly regions,

provinces, or nations. The main focus of population health is to attain greater health care provision,

reduced health care cost and improve quality measures which many health practitioners, nurses inclusive,

have widely accepted and have in settings affected how health care is delivered. Population health

involves a wide range of activities and professional terrains and is faced with ethical dilemmas which

makes it important for population health practitioners to be motivated to practice their duties in line with

the professional ethics and guidelines while not disregarding the moral framework of their profession.

Everywhere today, nurses are faced with ethical issues in patient care, ranging from ethical endeavours

like communication, confidentiality, and the generality of meeting the needs of their patients.

Correspondingly, nurses are expected to carry out their professional assignments deeply rooted in its

foundational principles, ethics, and moral virtues. Current health issues, through the lens of population

health are increasingly gaining attention; with the ethical principle framework and moral decision making

models coming to aid in finding long-lasting resolutions to ethics related health issues.

Informed Consent: A Typical Health Care Ethical Issue

As nurses, informed consent is a phenomenon dealt with on a regular interval, as it involves the task of

getting and witnessing written consent for medical treatment. Informed consent on admission to a health

care facility, and/or before a procedure, treatment or surgery. Informed consent could be legal and ethical;

that is, a signature of the patient or his/her surrogate, after being informed of the risks, alternatives and

benefits involved, provides the legal documentation of the patient’s consent, while the patient, fully aware

of the stakes and freely agrees to the terms, is concerned ethical as the patient’s autonomy is sought.

Issues arise with informed consent as consent can be withdrawn by patients at any time, and nurses and

health professionals must accept and support withdrawal and refute of patient’s consent. Consent gets
affected by a variety of conditions such as the complicacy of the treatment, the patient’s ability to

understand, and the condition of treatment (discretional or critical).

A Hypothetical Informed Consent Situation

In a busy psychiatric hospital, a young mother was admitted, found unresponsive after a drug overdose.

She was taken into the emergency room for stabilise and her child was taken into protective custody.

After being met with the consent form, in a locked ward, she was terrified, afraid of herself and her child

whose whereabouts is unknown her. When attending to such young mother, whose concerns are obvious,

it is ethical to carefully make her aware of all her concerns, the risks, alternatives and benefits of the

situation.

Following the four principle of ethics, as nurses, there must be elements of patient’s self-determination

and decision-making, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence when making decisions that concern a

patient. The nurse must shed all information concerning the young mother’s treatment and all known

information about the child’s whereabouts while being fair to the woman regardless of her status, colour

or her gender. It is being fair and just to her to respond to her adequately and kindly. She must be attended

to with such kindness and compassion. The young mother is opened to be fully informed of her

predicament, the best beneficial alternative with less or no harm.

It was clear that the young woman doesn’t have a choice of alternative treatments but did has a choice of

being admitted voluntarily or involuntarily. Penning her signature was in her best interest but ethically, it

is understood that it is her call to make, and as nurses, persuasion and giving clear information is what is

expected to be done in such situation. This aligns well with the nine provisions of the American Nursing

Association code of ethics.

Impact of Informed Consent in Population Health

Informed consent is beneficial to public health. Informed consent, as it might be argued, promotes four

key goals: recompense for injuries, prevention of injuries, trust promotion, and recognition of choice.
Each of these objectives is critical for population health preservation and promotion. However, in order to

effectively achieve these aims during a public health emergency, our understanding of informed consent

may need to shift from a narrow, individually-based right to a broader, population health principle. If

there are any common elements to the concept of informed consent, they are the provision of information

to an individual that is relevant to that individual's decision to undergo or forego a specific medical

intervention and the recognition that the individual has the right, after reassurance, to refuse the

intervention. There’s always disagreement about the standards that should be used to determine what

information should be given and how it should be given, however, everyone accepts that informed

consent requires a health care practitioner to provide information to a patient that a layperson would

otherwise not be expected to know. Furthermore, it is evident that this information is not provided solely

so that a patient understands what is going on. Rather, the information is supplied to enable the patient

make an informed decision about whether or not to have the test or intervention in question. Of course,

this assumes that the patient has a choice.

However, informed consent serves more than only the objective of empowering and honouring a patient's

freedom to choose. Compensation for affected individuals, injury reduction, and trust-building are three

additional that should be considered. Although the linkage of each of these purposes with informed

consent may appear to be antithetical to public health protection at first glance, each goal is not only

compatible with but also supportive of population health.

Recommendations

For patients to be offered ethical practice and quality nursing care, informed consent is a method of

nursing that each nurse must live out. Consent is a process adopted to assure patient’s understanding,

rather than just acquiring the patient’s signature on the form. This should be a collaborative effort of

every level of health practitioners, nurses inclusive. Efforts should be invested in obtaining consent than

just getting signatures.

Nurses can adopt best patient teaching practices that aligns with the professional code of ethics and

principles. Examining the patient’s understanding, adopting the ‘teach-back’ method and other related

efforts to ensuring patient’s consent are acquired before pending signatures on consent forms.