Assignment: Decision Making Tree

Assignment: Decision Making Tree
Assignment: Decision Making Tree
Assignment: Decision Making Tree
Week 7 Advocacy Paper Choose a patient-care situation in which the RN should intervene and advocate for the patient. An example of such a situation might be when a patient has not been given complete informed consent. Include the following in your paper: Describe the clinical situation concisely and descriptively. It can be an actual situation or a hypothetical one. Apply the Bioethical Decision Making Model to the specific clinical ethical situation that you choose. Address each section of the model in your paper. Conclude with a discussion of nursing advocacy in the clinical setting and the nurse’s role as a patient advocate. Your paper should be 4-5 pages. You must reference and cite 1-2 scholarly sources other than your text. Include a title page and a reference page to cite your text and adhere to APA formatting. Review the rubric for further information on how your assignment will be graded.
Current problems with the decision-making process for bioethical dilemmas are described, with emphasis on the social roles taken in this process by medical experts and laypersons. An approach is presented to improve bioethical decision making. Two consecutive steps are required. First, branching logic is used to separate the bioethical dilemmas into a series of independent, sequential decision points along a decision-making tree. This allows complex dilemmas to be dealt with more easily by resolving the individual component issues in a logical, stepwise fashion. Secondly, explicit criteria are used to decide whether each individual component is ethical or technical in nature. Using these two steps increases the likelihood that the professional and the layperson will assume their appropriate social roles and improve the overall decision-making process. How this approach can be applied to policy-making decisions, in addition to case-by-case deciding, is discussed, as are some of the settings in which the approach might be particularly helpful.