scenario
A single father has accompanied his 17-year-old daughter to a women’s health clinic and has requested that his daughter has a pregnancy test. The girl has not consented to the test and seems uneasy.
• Based on the scenarios provided:
What necessary information would need to be obtained about the patient through health assessments and diagnostic tests?
o Consider how you would respond as an advanced practice nurse. Review evidence-based practice guidelines and ethical considerations applicable to the scenarios you selected.
Assignment.
Write a detailed one-page narrative (not a formal paper) explaining the health assessment information required for a diagnosis of your selected patient. Explain how you would respond to the scenario as an advanced practice nurse using evidence-based practice guidelines and applying ethical considerations. Justify your response using at least three different references from current evidence-based literature.
Advanced Health Assessment and Diagnostic Reasoning
Healthcare professionals can encounter challenges related to obtaining consent when they are providing care for adolescents. In the chosen case study, a single father has accompanied his 17-year-old daughter to a women’s health clinic and has requested that his daughter has a pregnancy test. The girl has not consented to the test and seems uneasy. The healthcare professional must maintain ethics during history taking and diagnostic testing to demonstrate professionalism in practice and strengthen the therapeutic relationship with the patient (Dains et al., 2019).
The advanced practice nurse should collect relevant data from the adolescent and her father before making a decision to conduct the pregnancy test or not. The necessary information to collect is about the adolescent’s social history and a review of systems, specifically the reproductive system. It is important to note, however, that the advanced practice nurse can only go ahead to collect the named information when the adolescent consents to the process (American Nurses Association, 2015). The specific information to collect in order to understand her social history includes where she lives, the people/person she lives with, whether she has a boyfriend, whether she has ever had sex with a man, whether she is sexually active, the last time she had sex (if applicable), her level of education, whether she is schooling or not, information related to alcohol or cigarette consumption, her financial situation at the moment, and whether she is involved in a money-generating activity at the moment (Dains et al., 2019). When reviewing the adolescent’s reproductive system, the nurse should collect information related to her age of menarche, the number of days in her menstrual cycle, her last menstrual period, and the nature of her bleeding during menses (Bickley et al., 2020).
In response to the scenario, the advanced practice nurse should not conduct a pregnancy test as requested by the girl’s father when she does not consent to it. The American Nurses Association (ANA) Code of Ethics for Nurses directs nurses to adhere to the ethical principle of autonomy by respecting the patient’s right to self-determination (American Nurses Association, 2015). The patient will be able to provide detailed information that can guide diagnosis when he or she is allowed to make an informed decision regarding the proposed test and consent to it.
References
American Nurses Association. (2015). Code of ethics with interpretative statements. Silver Spring, MD. https://nursing.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ANA-Code-of-Ethics-for-Nurses.pdf
Bickley, L., Szilagyi, P., Hoffman, R., & Soriano, R. (2020). Bate’s guide to physical examination and history taking (Lippincott Connect). 13th ed. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwers.
Dains, J. E., Baumann, L. C., & Scheibel, P. (2019). Advanced health assessment and clinical diagnosis in primary care (6th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Mosby.