Code Gray: Ethical Dilemmas in Nursing is a 1984 short documentary film directed by Joan Sawyer. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
This documentary shows four actual situations where nurses confront difficult ethical decisions, as they balance the often contradictory views of patients, family members, and other staff about what is best for their patients.
Case 1: A newborn with probably fatal birth defects that is a ward of the state is in the Neonatal ICU and nurses must decide what level of care represents benefiecence, or "doing good."
Case 2: The staff in a nursing home must decide between respecting a patient's autonomy and the need to restrain her to prevent injury.
Case 3: The nurses in an ICU make daily decisions about allocation of nursing resources and bed according to the principles of justice.
Case 4: A nurse caring for a terminally ill patient faces a conflict between fidelity to her commitment to relieve suffering and the promise made to the patient's family.
Famous quotes containing the words code, ethical and/or nursing:
“Acknowledge your will and speak to us all, “This alone is what I will to be!” Hang your own penal code up above you: we want to be its enforcers!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“If America does not wish to end her days in the same nursing home as Britannia she had best end this geo-babble about new world orders. Our war, the Cold War, is over. It is time for America to come home.”
—Patrick Buchanan (b. 1938)