ETHICS IN TODAY`S HEALTH CARE FIELD

Ethics in HealthCare Field

Outline

Introduction

Ethics Defined

Medicine and Medical Culture

Elements of Ethics

Philosophical Roots of Healthcare Ethics

Philosophical Roots

Morality , Ethics and Community

Practical Applications of Ethics

Ethics in a Physician Office

Patient-Doctor Relations

Decision-Making

Confidentiality and Information Disclosure

Quality of Practice

Conclusion

References

Introduction

Medical ethics raises the question of how the activities of organizations affect the behavior of individuals and the values of society , and concerns important ethical questions about the role of medical

staff in the management process and healthcare delivery . Much of the discussion on these issues centered on different approaches of medical ethics and is reflected in policies inclined towards social responsibility . In practice , medical ethics is aimed to meet high moral standards and obligations . In the case of health care , patients have certain expectations of their healthcare providers , and the providers also have expectations about what their patients should do

Ethics Defined

Medical Culture and Medicine

Medical culture has indeed started to reflect on the consequences of the awesome powers put at its disposal by modern medical science . Recent years , special attention is given to medical technologies , such as within the areas of in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering focused on the ethical issues surrounding medical practice and spawned the specialist area of "bioethics (Johnstone 1999 . As welcome as such an engagement of philosophical reflection with medical practice may be it can still be argued that the scope and depth of the dilemmas of modern medical practice typically tend to go unrecognized . Medicine even with the contemporary controversies surrounding it , is still a profession of immense prestige . While physicians work very hard indeed to attain the position of respect they find themselves in , they also expect to receive this respect and are quite upset when it is not shown (Gillon 1994 . The vast majority of medical decisions are taken in an ethical environment in the absence of any obvious dilemma . They are made within an organic , ongoing relationship , in the spirit of open dialogue between doctor and patient . Yet the ethical environment of medicine is rarely discussed in medical courses from the point of view of its constitutive ethical nature (MacDonald 2002 it is virtually never considered in the international bioethics literature or popular debates For the physician , there is a manner in which questions are asked of the patient and responses are made to the latter 's answers or statements (Thomasma 2004 . Ethics starts from the premise that clinical practice consists of an accumulation of infinitesimal ethical events

Elements of Ethics

Ethical questions in everyday clinical medicine are both more pervasive and more limited than the conventional perspective provided by bioethics would suggest . Heifetz (1996 ) explains ethics as a mixture of morals customs and values , and laws . He states

Moral issues arise whenever human action or inaction affects others Customs and values reflect the moral underpinning of a society . Laws that mandate behavior patterns should , but do not always , reflect ideal moral values . Morality speaks to what is right or...