Nursing Administration, Ethics and Professional Conduct
Nursing Administration, Ethics and Professional Conduct covers ward management, staffing, delegation, documentation, consent, confidentiality and professional regulation. Questions test who may do what, what must be reported, and which ethical principle applies.
Management and delegation
Management functions are planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling. Delegation transfers a task, not accountability. The registered nurse may delegate routine, stable tasks to assistive personnel but retains assessment, teaching, evaluation and any task requiring judgement. Assign the patient, not the task, when continuity matters.
Ethics and law
Autonomy respects choice; beneficence promotes good; non-maleficence avoids harm; justice distributes fairly; veracity is truthfulness; fidelity is keeping promises. Informed consent requires capacity, information and voluntariness; in India the age of consent for general treatment is 18. Confidentiality may be breached when required by law or when there is serious risk to others. Report incidents, needle-stick injuries, medication errors and notifiable diseases through the correct channel.
Worked example
A nursing assistant is asked to explain surgery to a patient. The correct action is to refuse that delegation and explain it yourself or arrange for the surgeon, because informed consent and surgical explanation require a qualified professional with full information. The assistant may, however, take vital signs of a stable patient.
Traps
The nurse remains accountable for a delegated task. Do not witness consent without understanding it. Do not discuss a patient in a corridor or on social media. Incident reports are for safety improvement, not punishment, and are not a substitute for the clinical record.