Each with 175 words and 2 citations.
Post # 1
The coronavirus pandemic has been a devastating and unprecedented event leading to countless ethical problems. The first major ethical problem has to deal with hospital beds. Most, if not all hospitals have been at full capacity. This means hospitals have consistently had to turn away patients due to them not having a hospital bed. The next major ethical problem is resources. At the very beginning of the pandemic, there were daily rations of surgical masks at my hospital. We were expected to wear goggles with every patient care interaction which had to be cleaned and used again. Since we are a psychiatric hospital and not a medical hospital, we were given less resources. Other hospitals faced the same, if not worse rules which decreased cleanliness but resources were just so short. Hospital ventilators are still a problem amidst the coronavirus pandemic, but especially towards the beginning when no vaccine was available. Hospitals had to decide who got a ventilator and who did not (Mckenna, 2020). In the past, intensive care units did not need many ventilators, so when many sick people started flooding into the hospitals, the hospitals did not have the resources to care for them. Other ethical problems include the covid vaccine. As a result of limited supply at the beginning of vaccine administration, it had to be decided who would get the vaccine first. It was decided that healthcare employees should have access to the vaccine first because they had been unprotected for a long period of time with increased exposure (Geppert, 2021). The rest of the groups had to be selected with much thought.
Post #2
Working as a RUN (rapid response nurse) or an ICU RN, one practice-related issue that I encounter on a more frequent basis is the administration of beta-blocker, outside of the order parameters. Beta-blockers, also known as beta-adrenergic blocking agents, are medications that reduce your blood pressure by blocking the effects of the hormone epinephrine, causing your heart to beat more slowly and with less force, which lowers blood pressure (“What you should know about beta blockers”, 2021). In my facility beta-blockers are to be held if the SBP is 90 or less and HR is 60 or less. I have responded to numerous rapid responses where a patient had “Brady down” to the 30’s and was symptomatic. When I opened the patient’s chart and looked to see if the patient was on digoxin or beta-blocker, I would see where a beta-blocker was administered and the patient’s documented heart rate was 57 and BP was 90/70. When I asked the nurse why did he or she give the beta-blocker, she would say the heart rate was 63 at 0700 but the medication was given at 0930. Many Registered Nurses are not cycling the BP and HR before administering a drug from this classification. Most of the time the patient is transferred to the ICU and placed on an atropine drip. On the other hand, when I work as an L&D or OB ICU, preeclampsia is not treated promptly in the African American population. I have seen many nurses start the pregnancy-induced hypertension protocol, due to the patient’s race and the assumption that the patient had chronic hypertension before pregnancy. Some L&D fail to assess the patient’s presenting symptoms, past medical history. To me, ethics means doing the right thing even when no one is watching. Since I started nursing back in 1999, nursing has lost its ethics, which puts the healthcare facility in jeopardy with the regulatory agency and results in malpractice suits.
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