Ethics

1. Watch the Belmont Report video: Basic Ethical Principles and Their Application.

2. Review the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 1932-1972.

3. Answer the following two prompts

• i) What aspect of this study was most impactful to you?  Why?
• ii) Connect one ethical principle of human subjects research in the Belmont Report to the ethics (or, more accurately, lack thereof) of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. For example, if you choose beneficence, explain what is meant by that per The Belmont Report, and explain how the ethical principle was violated by the experiment. Use information from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study CDC information and the Belmont Report video to support your answer.

Quality Improvement

1. In acute care, a charge nurse is assigned to oversee a unit, and a nursing supervisor oversees the nursing role across a facility.  All work together to control the flow of patients in and out of the unit and facility, make staffing assignments, and assist with problems and crises. Consider this situation: A nurse is dealing with a crisis for one patient and misses a second patient crisis—a young woman who died from a postoperative hemorrhage. In this tragic situation, competing crisis events on the unit prevented a nurse from adequately monitoring other assigned patients on the unit. The charge nurse and nursing supervisor stated in the Board of Nursing’s investigation of the event that they depended on the individual nurse to alert them if help was needed.

Question:  Describe a systems-based solution that could have prevented this event.  (DO NOT state what the nurse should have done differently; you are to describe a systems-based solution, not a personal, professional one.)

2. Download the HCAPHS survey  and review the survey questions.

Question: Based on your observations in clinicals or in your job, describe a systems-based issue and a solution to that issue that has an impact of the quality of nursing care measured by at least one of the questions on the HCAPHS survey.