Factors that Influence Health Policy Decisions and Implementation

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Factors that Influence Health Policy Decisions and Implementation The factors that influence health, policy decisions, and implementation are also impacted by personal beliefs, values, and ethics of practice. As a nurse, an individual's beliefs and values help in identifying self-awareness regarding the aspects that influence their professional practice.

Therefore, an individual's values often impact ethics as well as the cultural values they hold, and the delivery of care. Ethics in the nursing context describes a collection of beliefs and value systems that guide a society or a professional group. The discussion outlines how to separate personal beliefs and values and the ethics of practice.

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As a nurse, one's practice should be guided by ethics. Whereas values are the core of human behavior and expressed in decisions and actions that they take, as a nurse, one should be prepared to implement the required ethics as a basis of decision making. The professional values in the nursing context guide action and establish a framework for regulating behavior (Ozyazicioglu & Surenler, 2018). Therefore, nurses should be guided by professional ethics and values as they execute their roles since nursing performance is guided by such values.

The core values in nursing include autonomy human dignity integrity, altruism, honesty, and social justice. These core ethical values are shared within the nursing fraternity and are a reflection of the human and spiritual approach to the nursing profession. Therefore, whereas as an individual nurse I possess diverse values guided by, for example, religion and on knowledge constructed out of experiences, it is imperative to observe the ethics that guide the practice.

According to Poorchangizi et al (2019), the care for patients is affected by the impending cultural, social, economic, and religious values dominating the community, thus the need to consider the patient’s autonomy when providing care to ensure their preferences are taken to account to provide patient-centered care. For example, a patient’s family may decide to hold a prayer session before a surgical operation of their loved one and in this context, autonomy requires nurses to respect the patient's spirituality even when they may not hold similar beliefs.

Professional values in nursing are demonstrated in the ethical code of conduct, which overrides personal values and beliefs. Ethical codes in nursing clarify professional practices, the quality of professional care, and professional norms. Nurses often experience ethical dilemmas especially when their values contradict the provision of nursing ethics. When such dilemmas are not well addressed, they could negatively impact the ability of the nurse to make clinical

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decisions (Poorchangizi et al., 2019). Therefore, nurses should be guided by ethics and internalize them to become standards in practice and guiding behavior.

From the foregoing, it is evident that the nursing practice is guided by ethics that should be adhered to all nursing professionals in the practice. Nurses have been confronted with ethical dilemmas particularly when their beliefs contravened their personal beliefs and values when providing nursing care. In such contexts, nurses must be guided by t ethics and adopt them as standards in practice, and guiding their behavior to provide the best possible patient care.

References Ozyazicioglu, N., & Surenler, S. (2018). Determination of professional values in nursing students. International Journal of Caring Sciences, 11(1), 254.

Poorchangizi, B., Borhani, F., Abbaszadeh, A., Mirzaee, M., & Farokhzadian, J. (2019). The importance of professional values from nursing students’ perspective. BMC Nursing, 18(1), 26.