Ethics7 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Ethics7 - Assignment Example The potential liabilities facing APNs are discussed in the following part. This is considered a nurse’s liability if he or she fails to monitor and assess a change in the patient’s condition and refer it to the patient’s physician. To provide optimal patient care, it is required that nurses have appropriate knowledge, skills and positive attitudes toward pain, its assessment and management. Furthermore, this should be based on the best available evidence in preventing patients from suffering harm (NMC, 2008). It is unacceptable for APNs to have inadequate knowledge about pain or patient to experience unmanaged pain. This is considered a poor understanding of their profession in this aspect of care, and thus held accountable if it happens (Diamond, 2002). The management in a bid to prevent this liability may undertake to teach the staff on the importance of pain management and steps involved. In this case pain can be incorporated as a compulsory component, aimed at equipping nurses with knowledge, skills and attitude to undertake proper pain assessment and management. Since this has worked elsewhere, Wilson perceives the result of this as patients receiving higher standard of pain assessment and management and thus reduce the incidences of unnecessary suffering and prevent potential liabilities (2007). These involve transcription and administrative errors by the APN. Medication errors can cause harm to patients, practitioners, families, systems and the profession. Medical errors may be human-performance based or system based. According to a report in the Archives Internal Medicine, nurses who are interrupted while administering medication have an increased risk of making medication errors. Modest strategies to help reduce interruptions may include easy access to whiteboards or other sources of information. Nurses could were vests with â€Å"do not interrupt" messages on them while conducting medication rounds. This entails failing to notify the