An ethical implication is a conclusion that can be drawn from the actions you undertake. For example: let’s say you help an old, suffering man in his wishes to die. You unplug his life support equipment, and he drifts off into blackness thankful to you for your aid. However, the ethical implications in this situation are vast and complex. Some people simply see a person helping another to stop their suffering. Others, however, see that as an encouragement of suicide when things get too tough. Others, still, would think it wrong because that man’s family has now been deprived of the paternal figurehead of the household. It’s not an easy choice, and depending on each person’s individual ethical code, you will be rated as everything from angel to demon. Basically, the term ethical implication is pretty much what people would perceive from your actions. If someone is stressing the importance of this, then they are asking you to be cognizant of what your actions mean. In reply to your additional details: The ethical implications are various, here. The best thing to do is to break it down for yourself. Think of each decision and what those things end up doing. Decision one: don’t tell on her. What happens here? She keeps her job. This can have various consequences. The patient may, for example, want to sue the place for which you work. The hospital may face some serious litigation, which may lead to various managers losing their jobs for their inability to control their department. In fact, you may lose your job, since you were the one checking on the patient in the first place, and should have informed the nurse of the elevated blood pressure. Since you didn’t tell anyone that you did, in fact, do this, then you would be the one on which all of this would fall should there be a formal investigation. However, in spite of all this, what is that nurse’s situation? Is she a single mother? What happens to her kids if she gets fired? Will she lose her certification? Does she have any other skills that can get her a new job, or is this pretty much it for her? As you can see here, there are ethical implications involving the jobs of others, where the blame is placed, and who or what may ride on that nurse keeping her job. For all we know, you may find that the risk may be worth it if, let’s say, the nurse has a seriously physically handicapped child and desperately needs this job to take care of him/her. Let’s look at option two: the ethical implications become far narrower in their scope. You would probably be looked on in a more positive light for making sure the culprit is brought to justice for what they did, and you may very well save the job of a supervisor or manager that was supposed to be monitoring your area. The hospital, however, would almost certainly face litigation claims, since by outing the nurse, you just admitted guilt for that person’s paralysis. Secondly, you just got that nurse fired, AND the nurse is probably going to face litigation due to her own actions that brought about the patient’s paralysis. So now, you not only have a nurse who will be flat on her *** with no certification, you have a nurse who will be flat on her *** with no certification and nowhere to go with a crushing lawsuit on her shoulders. That could be devastating to her, and likely has the power to ruin her life. So you see, the ethical implications here have to be weighed between what will happen to that nurse, and what kind of dilemmas may reach out and hit others that you never expected. Ethical implications are tricky, since there is always a new angle to look at everything. I haven’t even covered the ethical implications directly dealing with the patient’s pain and suffering and the pain and suffering of that patient’s family and friends, either. Hope all of this helped!

If you can bear the ethical implications of the aftermath, then only go ahead with this massacre.