Community health nurses. Their most significant ethical decision-making problems

Community health staff nurses confront a variety of significant ethical problems in practice that require focused attention in nursing education programs and in community nursing agencies. All community health nurses need to learn to identify ethical problems and to learn a process for resolving these problems that incorporates ethical perspectives. This is particularly critical because nursing colleagues depend on one another for help in dealing with ethical problems in practice. To ignore the ethical problems in community health nursing practice and to neglect to teach the knowledge and skills required to deal with them is to fail to provide nurses with essential skills for providing nursing and health care in community settings.