The ethical dilemma
The ethical dilemma
Jessica has been a nurse practitioner for nearly two decades. She has been providing primary care services to home bound and home limited patients since 2013 with an organization known as MD2U in Evansville, Indiana. In viewing the documentary, The Invisible Patient, Jessica presented herself as a disruptive innovator. According to Hamric, Hanson, Tracy, & O’Grady, “disruptive innovation transforms an existing market or creates a new market by making processes simpler and improving access” (2014). Jessica took pride in carrying for individuals in the community that were faced with challenges. In viewing the documentary, I was able to see many of them live in difficult situations. Some are unable to travel to see a clinician at a doctor’s office for a lot of different reasons. They all had multiple chronic conditions, and all faced some form of poverty. Jessica mentioned several times that there are only a handful of people currently reviving primary health care in their homes. Jessica background was in renal and telemetry medicine at Yale New Haven hospital. Prior to joining MD2U, she cared for the adult and geriatric population with dementia. She also spent a decade in traditional family practice prior to branching out. If Jessica did not provide her services many of her patients would have frequent admissions to the hospitals or require long term or skilled rehab services. During the documentary, Jessica displayed respect and empathy to her patients while delivering high quality patient centered care. Per Jessica, her services are also more cost efficient for the patients, especially since they were on a fix income.
The ethical dilemma that stuck to to me the most while watching the documentary was the care Jessica provided to the 34-year male Roger Brown. He was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at four years old. “Muscular dystrophy is a group of diseases that cause progressive weakness and loss of muscular mass” (“Muscular dystrophy”, 2018). According to “Muscular dystrophy”, the genes are abnormal, and they mutate interfering with the production of proteins needed to form healthy muscle (2018). This disease is very common in young males. There is no cure, but medications and therapy can try to help manage symptoms and slow the course of the disease. The normal life expectancy is approximately twenty years, Roger exceeded this. Symptoms may include, “frequent falls, waddling gait, walking on the toes, large calf muscles, muscle pain/stiffness and respiratory complications” (“Muscular dystrophy”, 2018). The ethical dilemma faced here was informed consent, “Concerns that patients and their families have not been fully informed about there treatment or clinical prognosis is a common ethical concern for nurses” (“Muscular dystrophy”, 2018).
