Association Between Individual Patient Care Focus And Social Justice Analysis

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Association Between Individual Patient Care Focus and Social Justice The American Nurses Association (ANA) 2001 Code of Ethics for Nurses emphasizes nursing care based on an individual nurse-patient relationship with limited focus on social justice and reform (Bekemeier, & Butterfield, 2015). This direct attention of individual needs and rights is the center focus in today’s healthcare system, especially in a hospital setting. Bekemeier and Butterfield (2015) states that this shift to individual care has limited the practice of focusing on the systems that have created the medical problem, preventing social reform that serve the greater good of the population. I agree that patient center care has limited are advances of social justice and public health promotion. Governmental institutions, such as Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, have adapted the focus of patient centered care by providing reimbursements to hospital based on the patients perceived needs and satisfaction with the care rendered. Major health concerns, such as substance abuse involving pain medication, are ethical dilemmas for providers as them attempt to meet the perceived needs of individual while also focusing on the greater good of all. Emergency Department are evaluating an increase in overdoses and deaths related to pain medication and at the same time they are obtaining clients seeking pain medication on daily basis for recreational drug use. The tremendous focus on patient satisfaction scores rather than the needs of the community has encouraged clinicians to provide the medications to those with substance abuse problem as result of demands of hospital administration and governmental reimbursements based on satisfactions scores. Jones (2012) states that one of the main barriers to social justice is the narrow focus of individual care and individualism in our country. …show more content…
She suggested that systems and structures become hidden because of the individual focus and must we look outside of the box to build bridges towards social justice. These bridges are built by investing time and money into health promotion, creating policies for the community, and fighting for the social justice of all. As an Emergency Room Manager, I have experienced this barrier to social justice in a patient centercare health system. The medical director and I had the opportunity to attend an excellent three day seminar in Chicago regarding effective emergency department management. The hospital administrators met with us after the seminar to present our initiatives we were wanting to implement in the emergency department. One initiative was excellent evidence based presentation on how to control pain medications abuse in your community with polices addressing those known to abuse the system for pain medications on weekly basis. The initiative was declined based on the perception of individual rights and the needs of the patient. Care-focused …show more content…
They emphasize the need for developing relationships and providing nurturing caring environment for our patients. Tong (2012) states that there is flaws with caring too much and the phenomenon of nurse burnout could attest to this fact. Nurses are expected to meet the individual needs of the patients even when those needs of the patients are considered unhealthy behaviors or morals. Providers have limited their practice of promoting heathy behaviors secondary to perception of discriminating or fear of not providing excellent satisfactory care perceived by patient. I found that many nurse are reluctant to promoting changes in unhealthy behaviors because they might be reprimanded for being mean and possible perceived as discriminating the rights of the

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