Analysis That Explains The Key Lessons Learned From The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Essay

Analysis That Explains The Key Lessons Learned From The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Essay

Analysis That Explains The Key Lessons Learned From The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Essay

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Macon County, Alabama, remains one of a public health organization’s most controversial research undertakings that violated several ethical principles. Studies demonstrate that the research breached public health nurses’ ethical norms, values, and competencies (Aguilera et al., 2020). The purpose of this essay is to offer an analysis of key lessons learned from the study related to public health leadership and public health nursing ethics.

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Public Health Leadership

Nurse Eunice Rivers Laurie was the public health nurse who worked in the Tuskegee study and dealt with the African-American subjects in the research, both the cohort and the control group. Therefore, nurse Rivers had an ethical responsibility as a leader to the community and profession (Waxman, 2017). Her responsibilities included giving correct information to the research subjects about the experiments’ benefits and potentially harmful effects, seeking informed consent, and ensuring that the subjects were volunteers and not coerced into the study (Barkhordari-Sharifabad et al., 2017). As a public health nurse, Nurse Rivers should have advocated for the protection of the rights of the 400 men who never received treatment for their diagnosed syphilis despite medical research proving that penicillin could treat the disease. The nurse had a duty to ensure that the research subjects received fair treatment based on biomedical ethical principles, including beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy (Vijayan et al., 2021). The fact that these subjects were harmed and never gave consent to be included in the study based on sufficient information shows that nurse Rivers ignored her role.

Public Health Nursing Ethics

Leaders play a critical part in establishing and maintaining ethics. Ethical leaders establish work settings that impact employees’ choices, behaviors, and values. The implication is that nurse leaders need certain competencies when encountering ethical dilemmas. These include nonmaleficence, autonomy, respect for patients, informed consent, justice, and beneficence. Nurses should consider the values that they stand for and the need to protect patients from any potential harm (Vijayan et al., 2021).  Cultural competencies ensure that they make decisions that align with certain health communities’ existing cultural values and norms to address health disparities. In this case, the Tuskegee subjects were promised better care and treatment as many had never been seen by a physician or sought medical treatment. Therefore, the nurse would have used the existing cultural competencies based on ethical values to convince the subjects and let them know the benefits of getting involved in the research.

Guidelines for Decision-Making

Nurses need to follow set guidelines based on their professional code of conduct developed by professional entities like the American Nurses Association and regulatory agencies at state and federal levels. These guidelines include accountability, fidelity, benevolence, nonmaleficence, and integrity.  Truthfulness should be the cornerstone of nursing professionals and allow them to build confidence and reliability by patients. Accountability ensures that nurses accept personal and professional effects for their actions.

Progress in the Field of Public Health

The progress made in public health to prevent ethical violations includes enacting legal frameworks like the Nuremberg Code that protect research subjects from exploitations. Further, the National Research Act of 1974 created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to protect research participants. The Belmont Report also establishes certain provisions to protect subjects in such studies (Waxman, 2017).The existing ethical codes by professional associations also ensure that researchers submit to criteria set by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) before conducting any studies.

Conclusion

The need for respect for individuals implies appreciating the authority of one’s preferences and decisions about their life. This principle is explained through informed consent, which implores individuals to get sufficient information about their participation in research studies. The Tuskegee study shows the need for public health nurses to be guided by existing legal and ethical provisions to avoid harming research subjects.

References

Aguilera, B., DeGrazia, D., & Rid, A. (2020). Regulating international clinical research: an

ethical framework for policy-makers. BMJ global health, 5(5), e002287. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Barkhordari-Sharifabad, M., Ashktorab, T., & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, F. (2017). Obstacles and

problems of ethical leadership from the perspective of nursing leaders: a qualitative content analysis. Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine, 10:1.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2017). Optimizing the nation’s

investment in academic research: A new regulatory framework for the 21st century. National Academies Press.

Vijayan, T., Cortés-Penfield, N., & Harris, C. (2020, October). Tuskegee as a History Lesson,

Tuskegee as Metaphor: Addressing Discrimination as a Social Determinant of Health in the Classroom. In Open forum infectious diseases (Vol. 7, No. 10, p. ofaa458). US: Oxford University Press.

Waxman, O. B. (2017 July 25). How the Public Learned About the Infamous Tuskegee Syphilis

            Study? https://time.com/4867267/tuskegee-syphilis-study/

Write an analysis that explains the key lessons learned from the Tuskegee Study as it relates to:

Public Health leadership
Viewing from a leadership perspective, what responsibility did the Public Health nurse who coerced people into the study, have to the community and profession?
Public Health nursing ethics
What competencies would guide a public health nurse leader when facing an ethical dilemma?
What guidelines for decision-making would you propose?
What progress has been made in the field of public health to prevent this type of ethical violation from happening again? What laws and policies exist to protect communities? Be specific, and support your paper with scholarly resources.

https://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/files/2-bad_blood.pdf