Ethical Case Study

A nursing school initiates a mentoring program whereby all undergraduate students meet in assigned groups with a faculty mentor each semester in their program. This mechanism is a ways to provide students and future nurses with a sense of empowerment and support, as well as permitting them to express themselves in a safe environment, without fear of reprisal. It is also a means by which the values of the profession can be transmitted. This mechanism provides students with a forum of trust and respect for expressing their feelings and of preserving their dignity. However, one group of junior students is experiencing distress. Their mentor, a senior faculty member and department chairperson, has an outside business and asks for “volunteers” to work in his “community health center, predominantly funded by federal grants, where they are expected to do unsupervised well-child health assessments. The students feel inadequate to the task, but the faculty person states that this is “related clinical experience that is supervised.” In addition, one of the students found the grant proposal on the internet and discovered that it contains provisions in the budget for registered nurses to conduct these assessments. This is a powerful faculty member; other faculty members refuse to discuss this with the students. What ought the students.