The Human Rights Act

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The Human Rights Act 1998 came into force in October 2000. It has a clear guidance about the freedom of every individual. There are few convention Articles are most relevant to the provision of health care services. These are right to life, right which not to be subjected to degrading treatment or inhuman treatment, right to liberty and security and right to respect for family and private life. Public authorities have no right to take off a person's life except in manipulated conditions, such as legally protecting someone from violence. Inhuman treatment is the treatment causing severe physical or mental harm. Take into account the application of fairness in your everyday work. Listen to patients and staff and treat them with dignity and respect and protect patient rights. Ensure degrading treatment is avoided at all times. Give staff the chance to have a fair trial and on the balance of probability, they are innocent until proven guilty. As a nurse your first concern must be the service users, respect their dignity and treat them as individuals. The act must be used by health care professionals as a tool to improve and support a human rights culture and condition. The purpose to provide care to people with learning disabilities in way which ignorance type or level of disability, cultural background, race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientate. The Human Rights Act 1998 came into force in October 2000. It has a clear guidance about the freedom of every individual. There are few convention Articles are most relevant to the provision of health care services. These are right to life, right not to be subjected to degrading treatment or inhuman treatment, right to liberty and security and right to respect for family and private life. Public authorities have no right to take off a person's life except in manipulated conditions, such as legally protecting someone from violence. Inhuman treatment is the treatment causing severe physical or mental harm. Take into account the application of fairness in your everyday work. Listen to patients and staff and treat them with dignity and respect and protect patient rights. Ensure degrading treatment is avoided at all times. Give staff the chance to have a fair trial and on the balance of probability, they are innocent until proven guilty. As a nurse your first concern must be the service users, respect their dignity and treat them as individuals. The act must be used by health care professionals as a tool to improve and support a human rights culture and condition. The purpose to provide care to people with learning disabilities in way which ignorance type or level of disability, cultural background, race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation.

Nursing ethics describes the collective moral principles that guide the behaviour of a group or individual. These are the relationships between the nurse and the service users and their family, other health professionals and the general public. The two broad philosophical theories are consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialism is the right action is the one that produces the greatest overall result. Deontology is the basis of all moral action, irrespective of consequences it produces. For example do not kills or harm anyone, do not tell lies etc. The four key ethical principles are Autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice (Beauchamp & Childress,2001).

Autonomy is generally defined as a person's capacity to act freely, without coercion or undue influence, to follow a path of their own choice. Autonomy is often at stake in the health care context, the person receiving care is highly vulnerable because of their capacity, age or illness. Always respect the patient’s decisions. Support and teach them to make their own choices. An important outcome of this principle is informing consent. Beneficence is the obligation to bring about good for others. This includes all forms of act and bringing it down good can be a result of x or emissions. That is things you do or things that consciously choose not to do. That is a complicated concept. An important aspect of beneficence is that many occasions it transcends the limitations of non-maleficence. You may have to give a medication that has certain known side effects to bring about a better overall result. chemotherapy for example, you may have to remove a painful dressing in order to clean a wound that would that otherwise become infected. Non-maleficence is the obligation not to harm or injure others. Sometimes it is necessary to harm someone to achieve a beneficent outcome. Giving an antibiotic with needle for instance or using medications with non-side effects. Justice, in the health care context is to treat people fairly, the obligation to treat cases in like manner. For example, to equally depended patients requiring assistance in their daily routine should be assisted. The problem is off course that in busy ward justices fairness is very difficult to apply. The second interpretation is distributive justice. We must respect the people’s rights and for the law. Theoretically speaking all four principles need to be upheld when making a decision. Practically speaking this is nearly always impossible. The reality is decisions have to be made by allocating primacy to one or more of the principles over others. Nursing is not just principles; three other ethical aspects of the profession are evident. These are virtue ethics, an ethic of care, narrative ethics.

Professionalism is a set of tasks, activities and nurse duties which carried out by the nurse, person’s health must be their first priority at any time. It is really helpful to look at what are the nurses and all the professionals’ values and how can we build up body of knowledge and apply them for the patients in a therapeutic way to give them the high quality of care. The nurse is accountable to the patient and the family, public, NMC, code of professional conduct, and the employer Confidentiality plays a high role in nurse’s duty to provide the high quality of care. Nurses have duty to respect the patient’s confidentiality. Just giving care to patients doesn’t mean their role is complete. They have to keep the patients details within themselves. If the patient believes that their medical details are not being respected, the relationships between the health professional and the patient or client won’t work effectively. Nurses’ duties on confidentiality are set out by the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s (NMC). Nurses should follow the code of conduct of confidentiality set by the NMC. Nurses are allowed to disclose the patients/clients information’s to other health professionals who are giving care to the same patient/client. The nurses have no right of access to the medical records of a patient/client who is no long under his/her care. Patents/clients must be aware of who will have access to their information and should know what for they are accessing it. In some circumstance nurses may come across to disclose the patient/client information’s. Before disclosing the information, nurse need to consider legal, ethical and professional responsibilities.

The NMC expects the nurses use effective communication and inter-professional skills to manage their therapeutic relationships. It is expected that nurses work with the service users to meet the service users’ needs. It is important to know that essential component of therapeutic relationship is establishing and maintaining the boundaries (gifts). It is the nurses’ responsibility to ensure that the boundaries are maintained. Gift giving and receiving isn’t issue that nurses must mainly aware of. Nurses must also obstruct stop and abuse of patients. As a nurse it is important to familiarise yourself with the practice standards of the department in the area. In addition to meeting the minimum requirement for the profession nurses should also strive for excellence.

Therapeutic relationship is the foundation for nursing practice. It is s an important part of nursing. Without the relationship you cannot find any important information about the service user. Without the information care will be ineffective. Therapeutic relationships have been linked to better clients’ outcomes. With the therapeutic relationship is an established client experience increased which resulted coping, improved healing among many other benefits.