MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE, ETHICS AND PRACTICES OF NURSING IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Nursing profession and job transcends the mere dishing out drugs at the bed side of the patients, prescribed by the medical doctors and other Para-Medics. It is encompassing to taking care of the patients/clients in many areas of health and in the life of the client. The Nurse must consider and evaluate the environment of the patient to be well ventilated, clean, and quiet. This would lead and assist the patient in his/her recovery. These are essential pre-requisites for quick recovery of a patient. Nursing is caring, is an act, it is a science, nursing is client centered, it is holistic and adaptive. Nursing is concerned with health promotion, health maintenance; health restoration and nursing is a helping profession. Nursing as a profession encompasses autonomous and collaborative care of individuals of all ages, families, groups and communities, sick or well and in all setting. Nursing includes the promotion of health, prevention of illness, and the care of ill, disabled and dying people and even helps a dying patient/client to a peaceful death. Ethics as is known, studies moral principles that controls or influences of a person’s behaviour. Ethics is the philosophy that deals with moral principles or code of conduct. Ethics deals and relates to rights and wrong conduct and morality. It is equally the standard that governs the conflict of persons, especially members of a given profession. Negligence is a tort actionable at the suit of a person suffering damage to the consequences of the defendant’s breaches of duty to take care to refrain from injuring him. Negligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man guided upon those considerations that ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do. This journal article tries to point out the negligence, mal – practice and injuries perpetrated by nurses in this field of medical care of the patients/clients. Nursing being essential personnel in the field of medical care of patients, therefore nurses must be careful in all her duties of care to her clients.