Deception in Healthcare

Johnelle Weekley

There are seven ethical principles that nurses are taught in school and expected to always uphold in their practice: justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence, accountability, fidelity, autonomy, and veracity. However, there are times when there is conflict between them. This frequently occurs with veracity and beneficence. There are times where telling the full truth to a patient is not doing what is best for the patient and can lead to negative health outcomes. This literature review explores this conflict to assess if there are appropriate times for the use of deception in healthcare. Information management is a common practice used, in which a healthcare professional withholds some information to change the perception of a client to improve outcomes. Therapeutic lying to patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia is supported by research, yet it still remains controversial due to its use of deception. Instead, there is a push within the field to use other therapeutic means of communication such as validation of feelings, or redirection to limit the amount of deception that is occurring and to preserve the integrity of a client. Often times, the risk of consequence seems to be a large factor in the choice to use deception or not. There needs to be more research to help reach a consensus on when deception is acceptable. Furthermore, the topic needs to be talked about more openly to help prepare new nurses for the ethical decisions that they are going to be facing in the workplace.

• Johnelle Weekley graduated from Dutch Fork High School in Irmo. She graduated in May 2022 from Lander University with nursing major and a minor in health care management and is beginning a position as a NICU nurse.