Question

You have been employed as a nurse in the emergency department for 6 years. Many of your co-workers are your friends and you often spend time outside of work with your friends. One day you notice one of the nurses, who is your friend and one of the best clinical nurses in your emergency department, acting abnormal. She seems to be much more tired than usual and she is disappearing from the clinical area frequently during her shift. You also hear one of the E.R. Doctors say how he is ordering an unusual amount of narcotics today for patients who do not seem to be getting much relief from the first ordered dose. After hearing this, you become suspicious that your friend may be taking the narcotics for self-administration. You approach your friend about your concerns and she is extremely defensive. Describe how you would handle this situation. How does this situation create a conflict between your own personal and professional values and ethics?

Answer 1

Nowadays there are various cases which are reported where there are extreme use of narcotics by the health care professionals themselves in order to relieve their stress and tensions of work as well as the households. Sometimes the work is very tough or very stressful from which they might not be able to come out or in some cases the professionals would have to deal with a very complicated cases or so hence in such situations the health care professionals tend to be anxious and fearful and inorder to calm themselves and to cope with the situations they take the help of narcotics to do so.

If I will ever come across such situations I would always try to protect the individual from the addiction of the drug.

I would handle the situation by doing the following things:

1. Collect enough evidence against my friend in order to prove her guilty of using the narcotics where she will not be able to blame me of irrelevant talks.

2. I will make sure to speak to her in private and win her trust.

3. She should feel that I am there to support her and that I will try to ask her about the problems that she is having in the recent.

4. She should be able to open up about her feelings to me and should be able to tell me about everything in detail.

5. Then I will confront her of using the narcotics which has been suspected to be disappearing from a patient's belongings.

6. I will try to counsel her and provide both psychological and emotional support to her.

7. I will try to inform her about the harms that the drug is causing her even though she already knows about it.

8. I will try to convince her to come up and tell or open up about her situation to the higher authorities before they found out by themselves.

9. I will make her realise her mistakes and make her understand the depth of her mistake.

This sotuaycreates a conflict between my own personal and professional values and ethics because here I am involved with the situation of my long term friend where she has been engulfed by the crisis of bad influence of drugs. And being a friend I should protect her from getting into a big addiction and also being a professional nurse I should make the person Infront of me using a drug for addiction to come out of it. But the conflict that I will face at this moment is to alert the higher authorities about it. And if I found out about it the problem is about my reaction towards it where being a friend I should try to cover the situation in order to save my friends job and dignity whereas on the other hand being a professional nurse I should inform about it to the higher authorities immediately.