Ethics in Healthcare
Introduction
Medicine and healthcare sector deals with human health, life, and death, while the role of ethics is to provide an overview of ethical practices and norms in healthcare. Healthcare professionals in service delivery tend to encounter ethical and legal issues concerning the working environment (Cecchi, 2016). However, some healthcare service providers demonstrate a lack of awareness of the appropriate measures and mechanisms to deal with the current ethical issues. Thus, the roles of principles are intended to oversight the healthcare code of conduct. Therefore, some ethical issues include patient relationships, access to care, patient confidentiality, malpractice, and negligence.
Patient Confidentiality
The principles and values in healthcare compel medical practitioners to uphold ethical issues when dealing with patients. It incorporates respect for patient confidentiality and privacy, essentially considered as the patients’ rights. Confidentiality is a critical factor and virtue in healthcare to build and establish a positive physician-patient relationship. The provision of law and healthcare code of conduct considers patients’ confidentiality as an absolute ethical approach except in the circumstances involving legal intervention (Vergallo et al., 2016). However, with a strategic approach and effort to maintain patient confidentiality, some of the instances leading to a breach of privacy tend to be unavoidable. Still, they should not be considered as unethical healthcare practice. Currently, there are no proper guidelines and management systems to effectively and clearly define expected approaches in ensuring patient confidentiality in the healthcare setting (Reddy & Chaet, 2018). Therefore, medical practitioners play a crucial role in ensuring patients’ data and information are treated with confidentiality to identify the problem’s scope.
Patient Relationship
Medical and healthcare practices are considered as an embodiment experience and encounter between physicians and patients. The role of moral activity and interaction arises from the desire to achieve imperative care for patients to improve and alleviate suffering (Brotherton et al., 2016). Therefore, the role of upholding ethical practices is to create a friendly environment based on mutual trust. The approaches compel physicians and other medical practitioners in the healthcare sector to demonstrate ethical responsibilities. The ethical approach is critical for professional service providers to place patients’ need above working interest and other obligations (Cecchi, 2016). The use of ethical approaches encompasses the ability of the physician to provide rational and sound judgment on patients’ behalf. By doing so, the practitioners can advocate and defend the needs and expectations of the patients. Therefore, healthcare’s ethical expectation is to ensure physicians can meet the patient’s medical needs. However, the relationship should be established on mutual agreement between the surrogate and physician.
Malpractice and Negligence
Ethical practices in healthcare require medical professionals and practitioners to act within the limits of the profession’s principles, norms, and values. As a result, the individuals are not required to violate the provisions of ethical boundaries for personal interest to harm the patients; however, their respective actions should focus on benefiting patients (Brotherton et al., 2016). As healthcare practitioners directly deal with human life, health, and death, there is a need to remain honest and transparent at all encounters with the patient despite the outcome. However, guidance processes should be considered at all times, as demonstrated in competitive healthcare principles, values, and norms. Such ethical practices ought to be implemented in the working environment to achieve expected treatment outcomes and results. It is worth noting that medical practitioners may experience conflict from one principle to another (Reddy & Chaet, 2018). Nevertheless, it is necessary to make decisions to benefit patients and mitigate the chances of harm. Therefore, the ethical principles and laws require healthcare providers to maintain an atmosphere of professionalism, honesty, and trust as it determines the ability to make decisions to improve healthcare.
Access to Health Care
Core values and ethical principles require a medical professional to promote healthcare services, prevent illness, and alleviate patient suffering. Currently, there is an increasing gap in healthcare and accessibility of services. The gap is attributed to patients unable to access essential healthcare services due to various factors, including cost and transportation (Reddy & Chaet, 2018). However, some of these practices are problematic if healthcare is considered to practice discriminatory, alienating, and unwelcome policies. Therefore, doctors’ role among other professionals is to implement ethical advocacy for surrogates from the workplace setting to management levels (Cecchi, 2016). Patterns and approaches determine proper healthcare accessibility and improvement measures to service delivery. These are considered essential practices and strategies to improve healthcare accessibility to mitigate patient suffering and other medical harm forms.
Conclusion
In the recent past, few healthcare professionals have demonstrated the importance of upholding moral and ethical service delivery values. Above all, the aim and purpose of understanding medical ethics are to defend patients’ fundamental rights and defend human social dignity. Professional ethics do not necessarily provide measures to avoid workplace harm but setting essential values and principles to improve healthcare service delivery.
References
Brotherton, S., Kao, A., & Crigger, B. J. (2016). Professing the values of medicine: the modernized AMA Code of Medical Ethics. Jama, 316(10), 1041-1042.
Cecchi, R. (2016). Comment on “The static evolution of the new Italian code of medical ethics”. Eur Rev Med Pharmacol Sci, 30, 2755-2757.
Reddy, R., & Chaet, D. H. (2018). AMA code of medical ethics’ opinions related to end-of-life care. AMA Journal of Ethics, 20(8), 738-742.
Vergallo, G. M., Busardò, F. P., Zaami, S., & Marinelli, E. (2016). The static evolution of the new Italian code of medical ethics. Eur Rev Med Pharmacol Sci, 20(3), 575-580.