Ebola quarantines: an ethical dilemma
| Subject: | 🏥 Health Care |
| Type: | Informative Essay |
| Pages: | 3 |
| Word count: | 876 |
| Topics: | Disease, Social Work, 💥 Domestic Violence |
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Table of Contents
Domestic Violence Against Men (Video)
The video is about a man who was burnt by his spouse and suffered a lot of injuries.Nevertheless, he also suffered psychologically from the fire incidence.In the United States of American, there have been a lot of incidences which are related to domestic violence against the men.Most of the agencies formed to end the domestic violence are biased.They mostly, lean towards domestic violence against women. It is important for more associations to be formed so that they deal with both male and female
EBOLA QUARANTINES: AN ETHICAL DILEMMA (VIDEO)
The outbreak of Ebola disease in West Africa prompted American nurses to go and assist in containing the disease. After long struggle fighting the disease, Nurse Kaci Hickox decided to come back to her home country. Rather than being greeted as a hero she was slapped with 21 days in quarantine. This was done as a measure of avoiding any spread of the disease. The two doctors interviewed in the video want the nurse to be quarantined until when the doctors her free from Ebola. Therefore this essay will explore if the action of the government to quarantine the Nurse was ethically and morally upright.
Code of Ethics
Do not harm others is one of the code of ethics in the nursing profession. Therefore all the activities that nurses do should not harm other people (Mclean, 2014). Even if they cannot help the sick they nurse should not harm them. Therefore Koci was put in quarantine so that she might not infect or harm other people in case she had the disease.
The other code of conduct is fairness to all the people who are being cared by the nurses and they are also in contact with the nurses. Therefore it was ethically upright for the nurses commission to accept Koci to be quarantine as it was a fair practice to all the people.
Lastly, the nurse has the responsibility of promoting health and safety within the whole community(Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements, n.d.). Nurse Koci was quarantined as a measure of promoting health and safety to the community. In case the nurse would not have been quarantined and unfortunately, she has the disease, then the nurses association would have gone against the code of ethics.
Values and Morality
The concern about the moral of the government to put Koci under quarantine is questionable when you analyze using the legal rights of the people in the United States of America. We need to analyze if the actions of restriction Koci and eliminating her legal liberty by the government were morally justified. Most of the people in the United States of America called for the quarantine of the nurse out of fear of the spread of the disease. Unfortunately, they were not sure that the nurse possessed ebola symptom. Most of the citizens used the expression “better safe than sorry” and used it to push for the 21 days of quarantine. (LaBossiere, 2014). However, it can be urged that if this expression was used then machines such as automobiles should be banned from operating in the country. This is because the automobiles are killing a lot of people but they cannot be stopped. Therefore it was morally wrong to quarantine the nurse because of fear. If it is so then most of the automobiles are supposed to be abolished on basis of fear and sorry. From the morality point of view, it was very immoral for the state to order Koci to put in quarantine for 21 days because of the expression better safe than sorry as gun laws and automobiles are also risking the lives of the Americans.
Micro and Macro Social Work
Micro-social work involves counseling people at the lowest level and finding some of the necessities such as housing and assisting in the mental health services. On this case, the nurse is supposed to receive mental health services through micro-social work.The social worker who counseled the nurse is believed to have told her the reasons behind the quarantine and by the end of 21days, it will be over. This was done to give her the mental strength of undergoing the process as she felt that she is being demeaned. Therefore the counseling involved being assured that all will be well.This will might have made Koci to have a feeling of not being punished by the state and the citizens of America
Macro social work normally helps the clients through intervening in larger systems. It can deal with advising the people about health issues(Blok, 2012). Under this circumstance, macro social work played a very important role in educating the people about Koci situation after coming back from West Africa. Citizens were complaining that Koci was not supposed to be allowed back to her home country as she might spread the deadly disease.However, macro-social workers were in a position to advise the people on the health situation of the nurse. They told them that the nurse is not infected by she will be placed under quarantine for 21 days as she will be screened for the symptoms of the disease.The ideas from the macro-social workers made people calm down.
- Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements.
- Blok, W. (2012). Core social work. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. (2014). Talking Philosophy.http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=8248
- Mclean, M. (2014). The Ethical Quagmire of Quarantine. https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/bioethics/resources/the-ethical-quagmire-of-quarantine/
Offered for reference purposes only.