Nursing Ethical Dilemmas

Introduction:
This essay will look at an ethical dilemma encountered in clinical practice while working as a clinical research nurse as part of a lung cancer research team. This essay will give a background to the subject area, look at the potential impact of this dilemma on clinical research and identify evidence based potential solutions to the dilemma. Methods of implementing the potential solutions into practice will then be outlined. The NMC (2008, p. 6) Code of Conduct states that as a nurse you must ‘respect a person’s right to privacy’ patient identifiers have been omitted for the purposes of this essay.

Background to topic
The dilemma encountered regarded a male patient who enrolled on a phase one-cancer research study. He had
The term ‘Therapeutic misconception’ was coined by Appelbaum and his colleagues in 1982 after identifying that patients sometimes falsely believe that the main purpose of a phase one research trial is to provide a therapeutic benefit to the participant (Appelbaum et al., 1987). It is evident that John is suffering from therapeutic misconception. He falsely believes that that he has been enrolled onto the trial to obtain a therapeutic benefit and not to test a investigation medicinal
This therapeutic misconception can have an impact on research by preventing clinicians from giving accurate, unbiased informant to trial participants. It has been widely reported that doctors often overestimate the benefits and underestimate the risks in order to enrol patients to clinical trials, particularly when they have an invested interest in the trial (Kimmelman, 2007). One research study recognises that13-38% of oncologists admitting that they enrolled patients on study to allow the patient access to ‘world class treatment’ (Joffe and Weeks, 2002). If health care professionals fall victim to therapeutic misconception, it is highly likely that they will pass on misconceived information about its therapeutic benefits to their