Contemporary Nursing Case Study

Making the Best Choice

Privacy and confidentiality are very important in the field of nursing. As nurses, we have a right to our patients to protect their privacy and confidentiality. Privacy refers to the right to have control over what information can be shared with others, while confidentiality is the right to not have any information be shared with anyone who doesn’t have permission (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2014, p.76). Sometimes in certain cases, we must break privacy and confidentiality.

The case study on page 77 of Ethics and Issues in Contemporary Nursing is about a girl named Lora. She is 17 and wants to obtain birth control. She has a lot of issues at home with her father and stepfather. She moved out of her mom and stepfather’s

The major ethical principals that will be used in this case are privacy and confidentiality. We as nurses, owe all our patients these principals when we do their care. We also can apply autonomy because she has decided to come in and obtain birth control. As stated by Das and Sil (2017), she has a right to choose her course of treatment, in this can could be that she decides to not obtain the birth control and leave the clinic. We will also use the principals of beneficence and nonmaleficence. These principals mean that we will only do things that benefit her, or that we will not do anything to harm her. We will also use veracity, which means to tell the truth. We will tell her everything truthfully about her care. Justice will be used also, and means that the patients have a right to fair and effective treatment no matter the situation. The issue of child abuse is a major ethical issue in this case.

In this case, we can use the Harm Principal. The Harm Principal states that the nurse has an obligation to report the child abuse and this trumps the confidentiality right due to the possibility of harm coming to the adolescent (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2014, p.76). If Lora was 14 years old, we would still have to report the abuse. Even though our patient has requested confidentiality, we have a legal right to report the abuse. Ethically even if we do not agree with it, we still must report it to our