Kath Melia

• PhD (Edinburgh)
• University of Edinburgh

Open access the paper from https://www.athensjournals.gr/health/2018-5-3-2-Zhu.pdf

This chapter is concerned with the professional integrity of researchers in social science. Social science researchers who undertake data collection and fieldwork, which involves spending time with those who have volunteered to be part of the research, have ethical responsibilities towards those who participate in their research. Particularly when...

The paper aims to understand how the Chinese nursing education and recruitment policy impacts nurses to leave nursing practice. There is a lack of feasible strategies to maintain a sustainable effective nursing workforce with an increasing trend of nurses' leaving clinical care. In its efforts to resolve the nursing shortage, the Chinese government...

AimThis paper reports a theoretical understanding of nurses leaving nursing practice by exploring the processes of decision-making by registered nurses in China on exiting clinical care.Background The loss of nurses through their voluntarily leaving nursing practice has not attracted much attention in China. There is a lack of an effective way to u...

The aim of the study was to understand why nurses leave nursing practice in China by exploring the process from recruitment to final exit. This report examines the impact of safety and quality of health care on nursing career decision-making from the leavers' perspective. The nursing shortage in China is more serious than in most developed countrie...

The aim of this unit is to give the reader an understanding of ethics, and an awareness of how fundamental ethical principles and our personal values and beliefs contribute to our way of thinking in making ethical decisions. AIMS By the end of this unit you should be able to: . Define the term Ethics. . Have explored personal beliefs, attitudes, an...

The aim of this unit is to explore and examine the role moral theory plays in ethical decision making in health care. AIMS OBJECTIVES By the end of this unit you should be able to: . Outline the theoretical position of Kant, and identify the criteria used in deontological theory. . Outline the theoretical position known as teleology, and identify t...

The traditional guidance to researchers conducting interviews in the field is that the researcher should say as little as possible and encourage the respondents to talk in an untramelled way about the issues under discussion. But is this approach appropriate in all circumstances ? Keith Melia examines the issues by focusing on research carried out...

The Royal Marsden Hospital and Nursing Standard organised a series of nursing debates during 1990. The debates centred on key issues for nurses in the nineties, and included a particularly stimulating one on nursing models. The motion proposed was: 'This House believes that the development and use of models of nursing has had a positive influence u...

As health care becomes more ambitious and medical science creates more expensive treatments, a point is reached when choices have to be made and resources put into one service at the expense of another.

Euthanasia is a vast topic — so vast that it is difficult to grasp its full implications. Yet, at the same time it has become a familiar subject, often treated in a matter of fact sort of way.

Confidentiality is very much a topic of the 1980s. We have already examined patients’ rights and the rights of health care staff. Rapid developments in information technology have made the public aware that detailed information may be held about them. The Data Protection Act has seen to that, although in fact that act only gives us some safeguards...

One of the basic assumptions we all make is that, within the limits of the law, we have freedom to act as we choose. Of course, we all have certain constraints placed on us by work, family and our social environment but, generally, we make our own decisions and act accordingly.

Freedom of information is important in any walk of life, and health care is no exception. We all debate how much patients should be told about their condition. Health professionals have to consider where to draw the line between full disclosure, which is the patient’s right, and withholding certain information on the assumption that to disclose wou...

Nurses have power. Like all other health care professionals, whatever strategies they use to make themselves more accessible, they cannot remove the power dimension in the professional—client relationship.

Throughout this book I have tried to present everyday cases and issues which individual nurses may encounter within the context of a wider ethical debate. In clinical practice problems often occur which require action; there is not always time for much deliberation. There is a tendency to look for some kind of guide to reasonable action in these ci...

It has become increasingly fashionable to discuss health care in the language of rights — patients’ rights, nurses’ rights, the right to information, the right to choice, and so on. Rights may appeal to our libertarian instincts, but they are not without problems. Apart from anything else, they are not absolute in the sense that by claiming my righ...

In the last chapter we considered the ideas of utilitarianism and questioned whether they had anything to offer when making decisions about the allocation of scarce resources. On the whole we found that it was not helpful to try to decide morality on the basis of the overall amount of good produced. We seem to have an overriding obligation to consi...

There are some things we take for granted which make the day-today business of living possible. One of them is telling the truth. No one would be so naïve as to suppose that lies, white and otherwise, are not told from time to time, but we must have some basic ground rules whereby we can expect to be dealing with the truth, until we have reason to...

Nurses and doctors have long taken the view that they know best how to treat and care for patients. Indeed, by the nature of the work they do doctors and nurses have a duty to care for their patients. A patient has to be able to trust his health care professionals and to presume that they will act in ways which serve his needs.

Firstly, we are ideally placed because we are there. There in numbers—a large potentially powerful group who are increasingly aware, and we are using our force, unity and power to advocate individually for patients and nationally for resources and policies that will give our patients what they have told us they want.

Today patients are more aware of their rights and health care professionals have had to take notice. Some argue that they have not taken enough notice, failing to create a consumer-driven health service. One result of all this may be that patients feel able to demand more of professionals and even to demand that which professionals are unable or un...

To lie or not to lie measuring freedom cruel to be kind whose morals are they anyway? balance of power whose side are you on? justice for all the search for objectivity an easy death? acts of faith confidentiality ethics in context.