Concept Analysis Paper on Nursing Advocacy Essay

Concept Analysis Paper on Nursing Advocacy - Essay ExampleHistorically, patient advocacy has been a moral liability for nurses. During recent years, nursing literature has been focused on the advocacy role and nursing professions has adopted the term patient advocacy to denote an ideal of the practice. Nurses assume that they have an honourable obligation to advocate for their patients. They also frequently describe their judgments and actions on behalf of a patient as being a patient advocate.An examination of advocacy in the nursing literature reflects broad and at times different perspectives. Advocacy has been described in ethical and legal frameworks and, more recently, as a philosophical foundation for practice. It has also been described in terms of specific actions such as helping the patient to obtain needed healthcare, assuring quality of care, reason the patients rights, and serving as a liaison between the patient and the health care system.Although multiple factors in fluence the need for advocacy, it is generally true that someone in the healthcare environment must assume the role of client advocate, particularly for the client whose self-advocacy is impaired. Generally, advocacy aims to promote or reinforce a change in ones life or environment, in program or service, and in policy or legislation. In healthcare delivery, these activities focus on health conditions, healthcare resources, and the necessarily of patients and the public.When nurses advocate for patients, they face certain risks and obstacles associated with the slewtings within which they work. Therefore, there is always the possibility that attempts to advocate for a patient can fail, and that nurses can experience many barriers when addressing the rights, choices, or welfare of their patients (Negarandeh 2006).The term advocacy has been used in nursing literature to denote a variety of nursing roles, each derived from a specific set of beliefs and values. The changing forms of a dvocacy may actually reflect the metamorphosis of nursing from the role of loyal, subservient handmaiden to autonomous health care provider. Strong however diverse feelings regarding the appropriateness of nurses to be advocates are evident in the nursing literature and may stem from the use of one word label, advocate, to represent several(prenominal) related and sometimes conflicting concepts. These concepts are defined as followsbeneficence-the principle of doing approximatenonmaleficence-the principle of do ing no harmunitary-transformative paradigm-a perspective that views human beings as unitary, self-organizing energy fields interacting with a larger environmental energy field andutilitarianism-an ethical doctrine in which actions are focused on accomplishing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.Simplistic advocacyMitty (1991) defined an advocate as one who pleads the cause of another. She asserted that this role is implicit in the social campaign between so ciety and a profession such as nursing. She noted that although advocacy may occur at the individual or sociopolitical level, the underlying morality guiding it varies from nurse to nurse. Ethics of justice might lead one nurse to advocate for a clients right to certain health care procedures, for example, whereas a nurse guided by an ethics of utilitarianism