How Nurses Can Advocate for Patient Rights?

Introduction: 

Nurse practitioners are eminent and significant health care givers through giving care and supporting patient’s rights. Advocacy means speaking for someone/ something and for the nurses, the means that they stand for patients and do everything to make sure they receive the proper care and their rights are observed. Here is how nurses can give patient’s rights a face and teeth in a tangible and real sense of the term.

1. Educating Patients about Their Rights

Patient advocacy at the same time focuses on providing a defense for the patient’s rights and explaining them to the patient. Healthcare consumers include patients have the right to self-governance, the right to privacy in particular healthcare situations, and the right for or against certain healthcare treatments. 

Patients’ rights can be easily grasped by the straightforward way the nurses put across the medical procedures, possible outcomes of all the treatment plans, and the advantages as well as disadvantages of all the options to be taken. If patients are educated, they can make the right decision with the kind of health care they want.

2. Ensuring Informed Consent

In the administration of any treatment or carrying out of any medical procedures on the patient consent must be sought and received from the patient. This means the patient needs to comprehend all that the procedure is about, including the consequences as well as other available choices. Nurses have a significant part in this process through ensuring that the patient is well informed and that No decision is being forced on the patient. If a patient appears to be unclear or uncertain, nurses can covering information or request a doctor to explain the same.

3. Maintaining Patient Privacy and Confidentiality

HIPAA has legally put patient privacy on an equality ground as patient legal right and therefore, all nurses should legally be made responsible for the privacy of the patient information. This implies that any knowledge that one may have concerning a patient understands or medical history and or treatment profile as well as details regarding the patient has to be held in complete confidence and only disclosed at the discretion of the patient. This right can be supported by the nurse in that they should protect patient’s records and only disclose patient’s information to those individuals who will be directly attending to the patient. Also, they can also design that special space where the patients are comfortable revealing some issues when the doctor is examining them or when they are discussing certain matters.

4. Supporting Patients' Autonomy

Patient self-governance or patient directedness is the right of the patient to choose. Nurses can advocate for this by persuading patients, to make decisions they cherish; decisions which are informed by their beliefs. At other times, a patient may have a wish that they hold dearly and this may conflict with the decision a doctor has made for the patient; here the nurses ought to stand for the wishes of the patient so long as it will not harm the patient. In case the patient cannot take decisions on his/her own due to the disease or bad mental health, the decision taken and implemented by the nurses can be based on the written incurred instructions by the patient; otherwise, the nurses can consult the patient’s family members.

5. Identifying and Reporting Abuse or Neglect

Most of the abuse, neglect or mistreatment is concealed until someone working as a nurse in a health care setting lays a complaint. Fighting for the patient’s rights is a way of observing and reminding the facility and individuals of the dangers they pose the patients. Nurses can defend the interests of patients by recording such symptoms and turn over the information to the relevant departments. This not only safeguard the patient’s interest but also guarantee that the patient gets the attentions he deserves.

6. Advocating for Fair Treatment and Resources

This is particularly possible since nurses have the responsibility of ensuring that a patient gets what he/she deserves without discrimination. Sometimes, due to patients’ race or gender or financial status or some other reason they are discriminated at times. Outsourcing is one of the problems that can be solved by nurses so that all patients receive equitable or better care similarly to those of the outpatient clinics. This refers to ensuring that patients can get the required prescription drugs, treatment or social services that a person requires to gain full recovery or to qualify to be managed with a certain condition.

7. Collaborating with the Healthcare Team

Advocacy work needs collaboration sometimes, this must be understood in order to get the job done. Doctors, social workers and other care givers as well as other nurses’ work as team to ensure all the needs of this patient are addressed. When there are concerns for a patient’s treatment, the nurses can speak up and make a point for the patient, so all possibilities are discussed. Because of their activities, they seem to develop good relationships with the patients hence, they can be of important to the rest of the healthcare team.

8. Providing Emotional Support

Thus, what is advocacy if not legal rights and medical procedures, it is also an emotional support. Often it is the nurses that are the first and sometimes the only contact persons that the patient initially communicates with, offering words of comfort and accompanying the patient through the discussion of what causes them stress due to the given illness or injury. This is because nurses, equipped with the knowledge of patient’s illness, can ease them into the reality of their health status to be able to force them into making the right choices on their own.

Conclusion:

Being in a secure profession, it is important for nurses to ensure they defend patient’s rights. That is why it became clear that, through patient enlightenment, obtaining consent, confidentiality, respecting the patient’s decision, recognizing the case of abuse, adequate patient treatment, interaction with the rest of the healthcare team, the provision of psychological support, nurses defend and advocate the rights and patient interests. Nursing is essentially advocacy and therefore the nurses contribute to the promoting and supporting of a values based client care environment.