Let me clarify a bit-your personal opinion doesn’t matter.  You cannot let your belief system influence how your practice nursing, because you will not be a successful nurse. Your nursing practice is not the place to show your bias. You will have to take care of people whose personal choices differ from your own.  Get over it; get over yourself. I guarantee those beliefs you hold so dear will change faster than your scrubs after a code brown.  Nursing changes your opinions and makes you re-think life, in the most basic and most complicated ways, ways you never imagined.
Moreover, patients can tell when someone is judging them, being insincere or flat out lying. Your biases will show, whether or not you want them to, so you need to learn to let them go. This does not mean you shouldn’t have values and morals; everyone needs them, especially nurses. You need to have ethical and professional morals that guide your practice. What you need to understand is that you can’t change someone’s choices; all you can do is give them the best information possible and help them make an informed decision.  There’s nothing you can do about the fact that they made decisions you don’t agree with, or wouldn’t have made. They made the choices they did, and now they’re on your ward, in that bed. And you’re their nurse. Their health care advocate, teacher and interpreter. That is the reason nursing is one of the most trusted professions in the world.



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