Ethical Health Care Issues essay

When working with patients and there families the health care professionals will sometimes have to face some of the most difficult decisions that deal with medical treatments that deal with moral issues like religious beliefs or have to do with some kind of professional guidelines. Health care ethics is a way for the staff to explore a way to act in the right way and to make the morally correct choice that will be based on the patients beliefs and what their values are about life, their health, suffering and in the end death. When dealing with moral issues is more often than not very perplexing.

An example of a conflict of interest with a health care employee can exists when an employee who has a responsibility to other people is in some way influenced, consciously or unconsciously by some form of financial or personal factor which will in one way involve some form of self-interest. With a profit-driven organization the normal motive for the existence of a conflict of interest is normally related to some form of personal financial considerations. A statement made by the American College of Physicians showed that “physicians meet industry representatives at the office and at professional meetings, collaborate in community-based research, and develop or invest in health-related industries. In all of these spheres, partnered activities often offer important opportunities to advance medical knowledge and patient care, but they also create an opportunity for the introduction of bias” (Mitnick, 2010). Some professionals are granted privileges that include things like the power to set some kind of educational and ethical standards which will in turn allow them to maintain their competence and become a trustworthy and ethical employee which will turn around and be beneficial to the patients and the society.

Dealing with the realm of patient care there are threats to professionalism and in many situations there are the possibilities for a conflict of interest. Sometimes doctors have relationships with outside companies and when this happens these relationships have the chance to create a conflict of interest when a physician decides to accept some kind of gifts, act as a speaker on behalf of an outside company or if they have some kind of interest financially in a product that will be used inside the hospital. A conflict of interest may arise when a doctor has the chance to be paid for their services. These conflicts will arise when dealing with any kind of payment system while each payment system will have a different concern.

Avoiding conflicts of interest

The prime targets for conflicts of interest are doctors and nurses. They have the opportunity to receive some form of promotion from pharmaceutical companies and companies that make the medical devices. This is the reason why the health care industry has made some efforts to regulate things. This includes the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America who updated the code of conduct for interactions with the healthcare professionals in 2009 and the the Council of Medical Specialty Societies volunteered a code of ethics on their own in 2010 trying to limit the influence of profit organizations. Even with these people taking these measures it has been found that many physicians have no problems with accepting free samples of drugs from drug companies through an issue of Archives of Surgery from the June 2010 issue. They also found out that a lot of doctors find it appropriate to receive free meals.

Noncompliance

Noncompliance is a failure or a refusal to comply or to conform your actions to a rule of necessity. This term is often used when dealing with particular medicine procedures in regard to a person not wanting to take their prescribed medication or for not wanting to follow the doctors orders for things. In this action we can look at the example here, “As many as half of ‘failures’ of treatment to bring elevated blood pressure down to normal levels may be due to unrecognized lapses in taking antihypertensive drugs as prescribed, according to a new study by a team of researchers from the University of Lausannne, Switzerland.” (Stephenson J, 2001).

It states in the reading that autonomy is the freedom we have to decide what we want to do. Whether a consent form as been signed or not the patient must be aware that they have the ability to withdraw from what is going on. With beneficence it is simply a person taking an action for the benefit for another person. Beneficent actions are taken for people to help prevent a person from a harmful situation or it can improve a situation for other people. Simply put non-maleficence means to do no harm. With this one it requires doctors to refrain from providing ineffective care or acting with malice. It is not very helpful sometimes because many of the treatments carry some form of risk, it needs to be checked to see if the reward outweighs the risks. Justice in health care is usually defined as a form of fairness. It implies that a fair distribution of services will be provided to society.

Conclusion

The ethical issues that an individual health care worker has to face will depend on what specialized area the person works in the health care industry. For instance a doctor may have to face some issues like a patient wanting euthanasia while at the same time a health insurance agent is giving insurance to people for the same reason and not basing their assesments on anything else. The author of Ethical Issues in Epidemiologic Research and Public Health practice Steven Coughlin states that all health care professionals will face some kind of ethical issues during their daily work schedule like non-compliance and conflicts of interest and both of these may have the opportunity to harm a patient health care employers try to make sure that they are able to provide some form of ethics training and to have policies for their employees. With these courses to train their employees the teachers of these courses try to explain what kind of ethical issues a health care worker may encounter, why the issue is there and how to deal with the issue. If an employee does not follow these guidelines the penalty can be fierce, they could face suspension, fines or even lose their job.