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Case Study: Neonatal Intensive Care

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This semester I observed a patient situation that involved a mother and father with sex offender backgrounds and a premature infant that was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). In this patient situation I observed social worker from the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services take away the parental and visiting rights of the mother and father due to their history. The mother of this infant was pumping to provide her baby with the breast milk needed for growth and development. As defined by Townsend (2014) an ethical dilemma requires a person to make a decision in a situation that seems to have no satisfactory solution, or the “choice is between two equally unfavorable alternatives” (p. 60). This became a difficult ethical …show more content…
99). The Bioethical decision making model is comprised of 10 steps that reviews information, gathers new information, defines moral positions, identifies moral and ethical values and anticipated outcomes of actions, determines what the best action is to take and who to carry it out, and evaluates the decision made and is designed to organize information in a concise manner to allow the best decision to be made. The first step in the model is to review the situation to determine health problems, decision needed, ethical components and key individuals. The key individuals in this situation are the mother and father that have the sex offender status, the social worker from DCFS, the nurse, and the infant. The only individual that has a known health problem is the newborn in the NICU. The decision needing to be made is whether or not to take parents and visiting rights away from the sex offender parents and risk the infant no longer having access to breast milk or allow the parents to keep seeing the infant and receiving breast milk. The ethical components involved in this decision are that the parents have a history of sexually abusing children and they now have their own that could be at risk for sexual abuse and that breast milk has been proven to have an abundance of benefits that are even more critical …show more content…
Of those I have speculated with the parents I can see two values that have conflict with me and the social worker; one, the sexual abuse of a minor and two, taking credit for what you have done. These are conflicts because it seems as if our positions on the topics are completely opposite. The social worker seems to hold no conflict with my morals, we agree that sexual abuse of a minor is never okay and that the parents to take responsibility for their actions. Since I cannot speak for the social workers position on breast feeding I do not know if this is a conflict, but it has the potential to be

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