Nursing Ethics Across the Lifespan

Catalog description

This course introduces undergraduate nursing students to ethical dimension of nursing practice. It presents the processes of moral reasoning and ethical theories, values, virtues, principles and other influences on the student?s capacity to recognize, identify and respond to potential and actual ethical issues. The course examines contemporary professional and clinical ethics issues that influence nursing practice, and to a lesser degree, it introduces students to ethical issues at the organizational level in health care. The relationships between ethical and legal principles are also examined. Various models of ethical decision-making are explored as students apply these frameworks to resolve ethical dilemmas. Students will also examine the role of professional codes of ethics and the legal standards that influence the ethical practice of nurses. This course is designated Writing Intensive. The course will thus involve a substantial writing component in which students will write and revise argumentative essays in the style of the discipline of healthcare ethics/bioethics. In their papers, students will construct well-reasoned arguments for controversial ethical issues that arise in health-care and nursing practice, and anticipate and respond to objections and opposing arguments.