Symphonology in Nursing Care
Have you ever refused a distraught
whānau or family member from entering the emergency resuscitation room because
you think it is not a right thing to do?
In our daily nursing practice, we
are confronted with varying human experiences that shaped our career. From
asking our patients to tick their daily meal menu to administering medications,
there is an ethical involvement. Complex as it may seem, ethical decision
making on the part of the nurse is paramount in every aspect of nursing care.
For an action to be deemed ethical, an underlying agreement should exist.1 For two people to beautifully dance a tango,
an agreement keeps the synchrony, just as the agreement between the nurse and
the patient, or the patient’s whānau when it is their call to decide.
As nurses, regardless of our
ethnicities and geographical locations, we employ various models of nursing
care. Most often, we perform our professional roles and responsibilities in a
manner that suits our style. Our own techniques in delivering our nursing care
make us unique as individuals. Knowing one’s style as a novice practitioner
might be a challenge at the beginning, but as time passes by, we get to know
our techniques of what we think is beneficial to us and to our patients.
However, a question from hindsight needs a bit of a thought, “Do we do it
right?”
In New Zealand, the Te Whare Tapa
Whā and the Te Wheke Māori health models serve as guiding tools amongst health
care workers in the delivery of care.10 These two models emphasise and
recognise the importance of the roles of whānau members on patient recovery and
general well-being. Although these health models are based on Māori culture,
its applicability across different cultures is evident where the integral role
of family on general health is crucial. These models have been adapted by
hospital policy makers on the vision to provide a culturally safe health care.
While some hospital departments foster a patient-centred care framework, some
adapt a patient and whānau/family-centred care framework as an approach to
quality health care among New Zealanders.3,4
This article explores the
Bioethical Theory of Symphonology by James Husted and Gladys Husted, its
applicability to our practice in New Zealand context and its interrelatedness
to the health models familiar in New Zealand. Symphonology comes from the Greek
word symphonia, which means agreement. This article will attempt to expound the
Bioethical Theory of Symphonology using patient and whānau-based case studies
approach.
The Bioethical Theory of
Symphonology is a context-driven, ethical decision-making model that guides
holistic interaction and explores the nature of agreements between patients and
health care providers in diverse clinical settings. It is a bioethical theory
developed by James Husted and Gladys Husted that centralizes on bioethics in
patient care. It particularly presents the need to address individualistic
approaches and to prevent the pitfalls of some bioethical principles.
Symphonology emphasizes patient preferences, psychological and theological
knowledge, and context of awareness and of the situation.1 Implicit in this
theory is the preface that for participation to exist, agreement must exist
between all rational beings.1
In the context of whānau-centred
nursing care, the provision of care does not just focus on our patients but
also the needs of the whānau in crisis, especially if the patient becomes
incompetent to decide or there are no predetermined wishes of the patient to
exclude whānau members in the plan of care. If our patients could not
rationally act for themselves, we should remain to act as their rational
advocates.
Its goal is to ethically provide
patient care using six bioethical standards. These standards are autonomy,
freedom, objectivity, self-assertion, beneficence and fidelity. These
bioethical standards serve as preconditions of each agreement. They reflect
characteristics intrinsic to both health care staff and patient—to anyone who
has the potential to make an agreement. For health care providers, these
standards provide a means to learn more about the patient and identify aspects
of care that need support.1
Autonomy is considered as the
"umbrella of the agreement" – everything stems from one's core
identity.1 The patient or the whānau use his/their individual rights and power
to control and to fulfil their desires. It does not connote to the usual meaning
of autonomy but to the uniqueness of a person as an individual. A whānau member
may be very motivated to witness a cardiopulmonary resuscitation and to support
the patient in this most critical situation. This may stimulate the patient's
will to live or to provide comfort as the patient dies.5,6 The reason for his
motivation to witness the resuscitation makes him a unique individual. The
experience would help him confirm the reality of the patient's condition and
may help him cope in the process.7
The patient's whānau needs to have
the ability and the freedom to act and to make decisions about his actions.
Freedom must be a precondition to any agreement.1 A patient's wife utilizes her
freedom by choosing to help the staff nurse performing a bed wash to her husband
and by choosing to stay beside the patient during his futile times. The
patient's whānau member chooses the actions that will help her cope in the
process with what she thinks are convenient to her.
One’s intellectual capacity is
known as objectivity.1 The need to be aware of all pertinent information
affects the bioethical decision-making process. Hence, the healthcare
professional provides information about the patient that aids the patient's
whānau member to develop an objective view of the situation, which is a major
factor in executing end-of-life decisions when emergency interventions fail.
The patient's whānau then, has information to make the decision about the
medical treatment and subsequent ways to whether or not withdraw patient's life
support, when it becomes their call to decide on a patient’s behalf.
Before entering into an agreement,
the whānau members determine that they have freely chosen to get well and stay
well. The patient's whānau has the power and right to control their own time
and effort known as self-assertion. This implies a person's self-governance.1
In desiring to control their time at this stressful event, they optimize the
brief time that they have to be comforted by their loved one. Nevertheless,
when there is an unexpected death, there will be no time for those last
intimate moments.8 The nurse, along with the other health care team members,
can control time and effort and be able to optimize it by arranging appropriate
time for families to visit, whānau conference or making the whānau room
available for them. In a clinical setting where a nurse caters multiple
patients, it is deemed unethical for a nurse to stay longer with Patient A who
has the same acuity with Patient B, simply because the former is more
talkative. A nurse can control time and
effort via fair prioritisation of needs, boundary setting and by always putting
in mind other patients who are yet to be attended.
If the clients cannot act on their
own behalf, it is the health care provider's role to do what is for the
patient's or the whānau’s best interest in a benevolent manner. This is called
beneficence. Whānau members will be assessed by a health care provider for
appropriate levels of coping, age limit, the absence of combative behaviours,
extreme emotional instability and behaviours of concerns during emergency
situations. The whānau will be presented with the option to be present and
members who prefer not to be present will be supported in their decision. The
desire to avoid an ethical dilemma or compromise in safety from occurring is
the presumed benefit.
Fidelity is also considered as a
base structure of an agreement.1 No agreement is established if there is no
intent to be faithful. The patient or the whānau member needs to be true to his
uniqueness; to stay true to the decisions that have made him who he is. This is
fidelity. For the health care providers, fidelity is commitment to the
obligation of our corresponding professional roles.1 The whānau members who
want to witness resuscitation are expected to resume to normal lifestyle and to
cope well the grieving process if in case emergency interventions fail. The
team provides a supportive role to the clients during bereavement as a way of
being faithful to the role. However, if there is difficulty for patients or
whānau members to resume to normal living like unexpressed grief, it is the
responsibility of the health care team to devise approaches e.g. adequate
referrals in order to address the problem and to avoid the consequences that
could occur. By taking this into account, we are being faithful to our
professional role.
Symphonology and Cultural Defiance
While cultural factors need to be
considered in caring for a patient, there is still no justification for
refusing patient’s personal wishes considered defiant to her culture in order
to serve as the standard of culturally congruent care.9 If the competent
patient defies her culture and prefers for her needs to be addressed
differently, her autonomy and her individual wishes have to be regarded. It is
the nurse’s ethical responsibility to serve as her advocate for her wishes,
unless when the patient is deemed incompetent to decide and there were no prior
known wishes that it’s time for the next of kin to make a call. This is due to
the fact that cultural differences can also occur between different persons of
the same culture.9 For example, if whānau members coordinated with the staff
about doing a prayer vigil at the sedated and intubated patient’s bedside and
the patient had specifically expressed prior wishes to the nurse requesting not
to have this done on her, it is the nurse’s responsibility to advocate for her
and explain to the whānau about her wishes in a manner that this does not
disintegrate the patient from her whānau onwards.9 The bioethical standards of
autonomy, freedom, objectivity, self-assertion, beneficence and fidelity should
be put into consideration to address her individuality, rather than addressing
the culture through the patient.9
Pitfalls of Utilitarianism and
Deontology
This theory is designed to avoid
the pitfalls of utilitarianism and deontology.1 The central concepts in
utilitarianism focus on good versus evil. With this principle, ethical
decisions are guided towards achieving what is good for a greater number of
people, regardless of what is good for the individual.1 If a showering a
patient in the morning yields a presumed benefit to the majority and a nurse
sticks to this principle, she will do this to all her patients; however, this
does not benefit few patients who only shower every other day. If a nurse
provides complex details about a new condition to an anxious patient who fears
to hear anything about her diagnosis on the premise that this would benefit
her, it breaches the ethical standards despite the fact that a greater number
of people want to know everything possible.
Deontology, on the other hand is a
moral principle that determines what is right from wrong based on the adherence
to the rule. When making decisions, the individual performs his role, and his
role is to do what is right. Not doing one's role is wrong.1 Chinn and Kramer
(2004), as cited by Cutilli (2009) stressed that what is right may not be good;
it may not lead to achieving a favourable outcome.10 A nurse who employs a
deontological approach on her practice does her duty regardless of the
consequence of her action. If the hospital policy is not to allow whānau to be
present during cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the emergency department and
the health care provider sticks to the rule because he thinks that it is his
duty to abide to the unit policy, it is considered ethical under the
deontological principle, but this may not lead to a good outcome for the whānau
member who prefer to be present, which may lead to heightened anxiety and
unexpressed grief. While health care providers worry of negative psychological
aftermaths on witnessed resuscitation, evidences on studies show that there is
no or lesser negative psychological impact on relatives who witnessed than
those who did not.11,12 Unexpressed grief leads to unresolved grief and is a
known contributing factor to high cases of mental health issues.
As we further encounter bioethical
issues in our practice, it is very important for us as health care providers to
unlock the barriers that hamper a coordinated delivery of care. Agreement is
the basis for a coordinated partnership, which enhances a smooth delivery of
care in the process. By applying this bioethical theory in practice settings,
we can bridge ethical gaps. As Cutilli (2009) implied, it is not a complicated
job for the health care team to do especially for nurses, since most nurses are
doing this already without the realisation of it. A nurse gains a feeling of
efficacy for oneself by being a "consistent ethical agent" for the
patient and their families.10 This is achieved by having awareness of the terms
of the agreement and of the importance of the contexts within the agreement.1
Caring is the core embedded in our
nursing profession. For an effective and efficient delivery of care, both
patient and staff must be on the same light. It is by virtue of agreement that
care becomes congruent to the individual needs of our patients and it is by
then that care becomes ethical.
The writer currently
works as a staff nurse in the Department of Critical Care Medicine at Auckland
City Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand.
This is the original article of the same sort published in Kai Tiaki Nursing Journal, New Zealand, August 2015..
1. Husted,
J. H., Husted, G.L. (2008) Ethical Decision Making in Nursing and Health Care:
The Symphonological Approach (4th ed.). New York : Springer Publishing Company.
2. Ministry
of Health. (2015) Maori Health Models.
http://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/populations/maori-health/maori-health-models.
Retrieved 07/04/2015.
3. Bay
of Plenty District Health Board (BOPDHB). (2012) Excellence through Patient And
Family-Centred Care.
http://www.bopdhb.govt.nz/media/35057/1.1%20Literature%20Review.pdf. Retrieved 07/04/2015.
4. Taranaki
District Health Board (TDHB). (2014) Patient and Family/Whanau-Centred Care
Framework. http://www.tdhb.org.nz/misc/documents/2014-Patient-Family-Whanau-Centred-Care.pdf. Retrieved 07/04/2015.
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S. M. (2001) Near-death experience: a concept analysis as applied to nursing.
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8. Philips,
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Retrieved 07/04/2015.
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11. Robinson, S.M., Mackenzie-Ross, S., Hewson, G.,
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