Unit structure and weightings are taken from the Deakin 2026 handbook entry for HNN120. Task wording, due date and criterion wording sit behind CloudDeakin, so the values above reconstruct the published 2023 and 2024 versions of the same task and should be confirmed against the unit site in week 1.

Deakin University sets Assessment Task 2 in HNN120 Quality and Safety in Health Care 1 as a 1200 word case study worth 30 percent of the unit mark, and the task exists to test whether a first year nursing student can separate a legal problem from an ethical one and then attach both to named professional standards. Patient safety in Australian health care rests on registered nurses knowing which regulator governs them, which code describes their conduct and which statute governs the record they write in. One incident analysis shows whether a student can move between those three instruments without collapsing them into a general complaint about poor care.

The task also builds the writing habits that later units assume. Students learn to argue from a source rather than describe a document, to choose evidence that fits a claim, and to keep an argument inside a word budget. Most marks are lost here for reasons unrelated to effort: a student names manslaughter instead of negligence, cites a code without a principle number, or explains what honesty means in general terms instead of what honesty required at 03:00 on the night in question.

The scenario below is a teaching case built for this brief from the pattern of Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia tribunal findings on falsified observation charts. Names and facility details are fictional. Legal analysis has been updated for 2026, because the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards and the Aged Care Act 2024 (Cth) have applied to registered providers since 1 November 2025, so an incident of this kind now sits inside a statutory rights framework that did not exist when the Aged Care Act 1997 governed the sector.

Harold Nguyen, 87, lives in a 96 bed residential aged care home in regional Victoria. He has advanced Parkinson’s disease and takes levodopa each evening. He has taken apixaban since 2023 for atrial fibrillation.

At 02:35 an assistant in nursing finds Harold on the floor of his ensuite after an unwitnessed fall. He is conscious, oriented and reports no head strike. The AIN helps him back to bed and reports the fall to registered nurse A, the only registered nurse on site.

The home’s falls policy requires neurological observations every hour for four hours after an unwitnessed fall in a resident taking an anticoagulant, a medical review within 30 minutes, and notification of the resident’s family.

RN A does not attend Harold. At 03:00 and again at 04:00 she enters observations in the electronic progress notes, recording a Glasgow Coma Scale score of 15 with equal and reactive pupils. No observations were performed.

At 04:05 the AIN tells RN A that Harold is difficult to rouse and that his speech is slurred. RN A replies that he has probably had a busy night and does not contact the on call general practitioner.

At 06:40 a personal care worker finds Harold with a Glasgow Coma Scale score of 11 and a dilated right pupil. An ambulance transfers him to the regional hospital, where imaging shows an acute subdural haematoma. He dies on day nine.

The family first learns of the fall when paramedics arrive. The facility notifies the incident to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and to Ahpra. During the investigation RN A amends the 03:00 and 04:00 entries, replaces the observation values, and denies any alteration until the audit trail is produced at a nursing and midwifery tribunal hearing.

Answer both questions. Each response runs to approximately 600 words and each stands as a separate piece of argument rather than a section of one long narrative.

1. Question 1, 600 words. Identify one legal factor and one ethical factor that were breached in this situation, and explain how each was breached.
2. Question 2, 600 words. Identify and explain two relevant aspects of the Code of conduct for nurses and two relevant aspects of the ICN Code of Ethics for Nurses that were not upheld in this scenario.

Steps to follow

1. Read the scenario twice and mark every moment where a decision was made. Note the time of each decision, because the timeline carries the argument about foreseeability.
2. Open the NMBA Code of conduct and the ICN Code of Ethics side by side. Record the principle number or standard number that applies before writing a sentence.
3. State each factor in one sentence, then spend the rest of the paragraph proving it against the facts rather than defining it.
4. Attach a consequence to each breach. A breach that harmed nobody reads as a technicality, while a breach that delayed escalation to hospital reads as negligence.
5. Draft to 600 words per response, then cut. Padding with definitions of duty of care will cost marks under the first criterion.
6. Build the reference list before the final edit, and confirm that every in text citation appears in it.
7. Convert to PDF, reopen the file, and check that headings and page breaks survived conversion.

• Format: Arial 11 point or Times New Roman 12 point, 1.5 line spacing, 2.54 cm margins, page numbers in the header.
• Structure: title page, Question 1 response, Question 2 response, reference list beginning on a new page.
• Headings: use “Question 1” and “Question 2” so the marker locates each response without searching.
• References: minimum eight, at least three peer reviewed journal articles, all within the last ten years, APA 7 throughout.
• Primary documents count. Cite the code, the standard or the Act relied on, not a secondary summary of it.
• Penalties: the standard late penalty applies after the due time. Text beyond ten percent over the word count is not read.
• Academic integrity: the scenario is fictional, yet the analysis is the student’s own. Contract cheating services cannot produce clause level legal reasoning, and their output is the most common source of academic integrity referrals in this unit.

Prescribed and recommended sources

• Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, Code of conduct for nurses, with close attention to 1.2, 2.4 and Principle 4.
• International Council of Nurses, The ICN Code of Ethics for Nurses, revised 2021, with attention to Element 2 and standards 2.10 to 2.12.
• Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards, second edition, Standard 6 Communicating for Safety and Standard 8 Recognising and Responding to Acute Deterioration.
• Aged Care Act 2024 (Cth) and the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, in force from 1 November 2025.
• Health Records Act 2001 (Vic), Health Privacy Principle 3 on data quality.

Criterion titles above reconstruct the published 2023 rubric, which carried 35 marks for the legal and ethical response and 35 marks for the code response, with the remaining marks spread across writing and referencing.

Legal Breach and Ethical Failure

Two factors sit at the centre of this incident, and the first is legal. Registered nurse A owed Harold Nguyen a duty of care that the facility falls policy translated into hourly neurological observations, a medical review within thirty minutes and a documented escalation pathway, so the failure to perform any observation breached the standard a reasonable registered nurse would have met in the same circumstances. Falsifying the progress notes compounds that breach, because the health record is a legal document and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic) requires health information to be accurate and complete at the point of collection. Since 1 November 2025 the conduct also sits inside a statutory rights framework, where the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards make clinical governance, incident management and open disclosure measurable obligations (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, 2025). The ethical factor proves easier to name than to defend. Veracity failed first, in that the nurse recorded observations she never took, and non maleficence failed next, because false reassurance replaced the only trigger that would have escalated a deteriorating older man to hospital. Fidelity failed as well, given the family learned about the fall from paramedics at 06:40. Research on missed nursing care shows that surveillance and communication rank among the activities most often skipped under staffing pressure, and that these omissions track with higher rates of adverse events (Chaboyer et al., 2021).

Codes Applied to Practice

Where the legal analysis asks what the nurse was required to do, the codes ask what kind of practitioner she was being while she did it. Principle 4 of the Code of conduct for nurses requires nurses to embody integrity, honesty, respect and compassion, and 2.4 requires an open, honest and timely response once an adverse event has harmed a person (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, 2018). Neither standard survived the decision to backdate observations and then deny the alteration when questioned. 1.2 adds a further failure, since lawful behaviour includes practising honestly and refraining from conduct that damages the reputation of the profession. The Code of Ethics for Nurses supplies the language for the same events. Standard 2.11 makes nurses active participants in patient safety who speak up and advocate for transparency when errors occur, while standard 2.12 holds nurses accountable for data integrity (International Council of Nurses, 2021). The care worker who raised concerns at 04:05 and was told to stop worrying shows how one act of dishonesty turns a system problem into a personal one, and how that same act silences the people best placed to interrupt the harm.

Escalation Gaps Under Night Staffing

The facts place staffing and escalation in the same frame, which is where the strongest answers do their work. Chaboyer et al. (2021) report consistent associations between staffing, teamwork and material resources and missed care, while noting that much of the included evidence is cross sectional, so a student should claim association rather than causation when linking one night shift to one death. Standard 8 of the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards sets the escalation expectation the nurse ignored, requiring health services to run systems for recognising and responding to acute deterioration (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, 2021). Residential aged care adds a structural variable that hospitals do not face, because after hours medical cover is often a telephone arrangement with a general practitioner who has never met the resident. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety heard repeated evidence that thin night rosters and absent clinical governance turn a survivable fall into a fatal one. An answer that names the policy, the standard and the structural condition, then shows where they intersected at 04:05, reads as analysis rather than as a retelling of events.

Does Intent Matter More Than Outcome?

Students often ask whether the nurse would have been treated the same way if Harold had recovered, and the honest answer is that the disciplinary outcome would most likely differ while the legal character of the conduct would not. Negligence turns on the standard of care and the foreseeability of harm, not on whether harm eventuated, so the omission at 03:00 is actionable in principle even if the haematoma had never developed. Falsification stands as a separate wrong with its own consequences, and that separation is the point most drafts miss. Treating the false entries as an aggravating detail of the missed observations loses marks under Criterion 2, because record integrity engages Principle 4 of the conduct code and standard 2.12 of the ethics code on its own terms. Akhu-Zaheya et al. (2018) audited 434 records across paper and electronic systems and found deficits in content, process and structure in both formats, which supports the argument that documentation failure is systemic rather than a single nurse’s lapse. The most useful study points for this question are these.

• Keep the omission and the alteration in separate paragraphs, because the rubric assesses them as different breaches with different remedies.
• Name the tribunal category that fits, and note that cancellation or suspension of registration follows serious or repeated failure to meet the code rather than a single administrative slip.
• Distinguish unsatisfactory professional conduct from professional misconduct using the language of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law.
• Resist claiming criminal liability unless the offence and the mental element can be identified, since most cases of this kind never reach a criminal court.

Wording the Open Disclosure Analysis

Open disclosure attracts marks that students routinely leave unclaimed, because the remedy is easier to describe than to argue. Philpot et al. (2024) set out open disclosure as a process of acknowledgement, explanation, apology and follow up, and note that an apology built on the word sorry does not require an admission of liability to carry meaning. Several Australian jurisdictions protect expressions of regret from being treated as admissions, which is why withholding information from Harold’s family served nobody’s legal interest and damaged the ethical one. The nurse’s silence between 02:35 and 06:40 removed the family’s chance to be present, to ask questions and to consent to transfer, and Principle 2.4 of the conduct code treats that removal as a failure in its own right (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, 2018). A strong paragraph states what disclosure would have required at each point in the timeline, then names the standard breached when it did not happen. Keep the language plain, and let the sequence of times carry the argument.

Closing Judgement on the Case

What makes this case teachable is how ordinary each failure looks on its own. Nobody set out to harm Harold Nguyen; a tired nurse took a shortcut at 03:00, took a second one at 04:00, and by 04:05 the shortcut needed defending. That defence cost more than the original omission ever would have, because a false entry in a health record removes the evidence that would have let the facility learn, the family understand and the tribunal treat the matter as an error rather than a concealment. Reading the case through the two codes makes the progression visible, and reading it through the Aged Care Act framework shows how far the regulatory response has moved since 2025. Students who argue the timeline rather than the definitions tend to find the rubric generous. The rest write competent summaries of documents they have understood perfectly well.