HNN120 - Safety and Quality in Health Care 1 Case Study

Assignment Task

Purpose of assessment task

Patient safety relies on registered nurses having a thorough knowledge of the professional, legal and ethical principles that govern nursing practice in Australia. Nurses must also be aware of the professional bodies that govern legal and ethical practice and the codes, standards, guidelines and frameworks that they must adhere to.

This assessment task provides you with an opportunity to evaluate a real-life critical incident and to consider the legal, ethical and professional issues that contribute to quality and safety in the health care context (ULO2). This assessment task also provides the opportunity to further build upon your academic writing skills.

Description

You are required to read a case study (see below) about a true event.

You must identify and explain one ethical and/or legal factor that has been breached and then identify and explain two relevant aspects of the Code of Conduct and the Code of Ethics for Nurses that were not upheld in the case study.

Instructions for this assessment task

Step 1

Read the below case study and highlight/take notes of the important information. The following case study is based on a true event that happened recently in Australia. The names and some details have been changed to maintain confidentiality of those involved.

A Nursing and Midwifery Board Australia (NMBA) disciplinary tribunal has cancelled a nurse’s registration after the nurse failed to conduct necessary observations and entered false observations in the patient’s medical record.

Nurse X, was instructed to monitor a patient, Ms Y, who had fallen in her aged care facility. Nurse X was instructed to complete and document regular neurological observations on Ms Y, as per the aged care facilities fall policy, and report signs of brain injury. Nurse X failed to conduct any assessments, and noted in the medical record that the patient had ‘slept well overnight, nil concerns’. The patient deteriorated on the following shift and died in hospital a few days later.

Nurse X, out of concern for the personal and professional ramifications of her actions, made amendments to the medical record and entered false neurological observations. When questioned, she denied making any changes; when confronted with time stamps of her alterations, she reported that she had written the observations on some scrap paper and forgot to transfer them to the medical record.

The aged care facility reported this incident to the NMBA. At the formal disciplinary tribunal hearing, Nurse X admitted that she had made false entries to the medical record, and had not conducted the necessary observations of Ms Y.

Step 2

You must respond to the following two questions about the case study. Each response needs to be approximately words each.

Question 1

• Identify one ethical and one legal factor that has been breached in this situation and explain how each have been breached.
• Identify and explain two relevant aspects of the Code of Conduct and the Code of Ethics for Nurses that were not upheld in this scenario.

Step 3

You need to include references for Question 1 and 2. This includes the requirement of using in-text citations in your responses and including a reference list at the end of your assignment. The reference list needs to be on the next page after you have responded to Question 1 and 2.

You need to have a minimum of eight (8) references for this assessment task. You must include at least three (3) peer reviewed journal articles. All references used must be no more than ten (10) years old. APA 7 Referencing Style must be used.

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