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:
“Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a “sock” in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“My belief is that no being and no society composed of human beings ever did, or ever will, come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and, whilst nursing them, minister unto you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you, and say: “Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.””
—Mother Teresa (b. 1910)