A nursing perspective of the ethical issues surrounding liver transplantation

Nurses who care for patients undergoing liver transplantation increasingly face a variety of ethical issues. These issues include but are not limited to consent, selection of recipients, and allocation of scarce resources. Nurses have ethical concerns related to these issues that are specific to nursing. These nursing concerns differ in perspective, context, and content from the concerns of fellow health professionals or the lay public. For the nurse, the concern regarding consent may be not whether the consent was informed, but rather whether the consent was freely given. The scarce resource about which the nurse is most concerned is not so much the organ as it is professional nursing care. For the nurse to address these ethical concerns, strategies will have to be implemented at the unit, institutional, and professional level.