Physician-Patient Ethical Dilemma in a Medical Setting
Introduction
Health care administrators are confronted with ethical dilemmas and difficult decision making during their work. As we have already discovered, there are important interactions between ethical behaviors and legal issues. Health care administrators need to understand the relationships as well as the distinct differences. Health care institutions have ethics committees that play a central role in the protection of patients' rights, the organization as a whole, and its staff.
Instructions
Imagine you work as a professional health care administrator in a large medical center. You have been asked to present a paper at a professional conference on medical ethics and caregiver-patient encounters. You must write a paper about a significant physician-patient ethical dilemma in a medical setting, defending the decision and conclusions made.
Below is a resource with multiple ethical case studies that involved patients, their families, and members of the interdisciplinary team. Choose one of the scenarios on this site, or select a case of your own choosing from another resource.
Medical Ethics and Physician-Patient Encounters: Case Studies and Best PracticesLinks to an external site..
Your paper should be 3-5 pages and should include a title page and references, for a total of 5-7 pages.
Prepare a brief from the perspective of a lead administrator dealing with an ethical dilemma.
Apply ethical and moral theories to a case study involving a patient and caregivers.
Outline the ethical concerns and potential outcomes in a selected ethical dilemma.
Propose a solution to mitigate the issues raised in a selected ethical dilemma.
Defend the solution from an ethical standpoint.
Use at least three peer-reviewed articles less than five years old.
Provide appropriate in-text citations and a reference section.
Meet clarity, writing mechanics, and formatting requirements.
Week 8 Assignment: Ethical Dilemma Brief
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Healthcare administrators sometimes face sophisticated ethical dilemmas and challenging situations where they must make hard decisions in their professional practice. There is a need to comprehensively understand the interconnection between legal issues and ethical behaviors since the two healthcare domains have an intricate relationship. The healthcare sector ethics committee significantly protects patients' rights, safeguards healthcare staff, and enhances institutional well-being. This paper explores a fundamental physician-patient ethical dilemma in a medical setting and discusses a comprehensive defense of the decisions and conclusions. Also, the paper employs the case of the comatose car accident victim in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
In this scenario, a comatose car accident victim relying on a ventilator lies in an ICU. At the same time, her parents and husband passionately discuss her quality of life in the future and the suitable kind of care that suits her needs and wishes (ProAssurance, 2017). Although many may consider the scenario a stereotypical depiction of medical ethics, it is vital to understand the permeation of ethical consideration in all the clinical experiences between caregivers and patients. Parsa-Parsi (2022) posits that ethical concerns are inherent in all the interactions between caregivers and patients, owing to the amalgamation of moral and technical principles in the healthcare sector. Ethical competency and considerations are vital requirements that each healthcare professional must possess since every caregiver-patient encounter calls for a moral dimension. The ethical obligations in the Oath of Hippocrates enable healthcare practitioners to apply their training and skills to help the patient and attain better results while mitigating harm (Parsa-Parsi, 2022).
There is an intricate interconnection between ethics and risk management. Card (2020) argue that the healthcare risk management concept dates back to the 1970s when it emerged as a response to increased lawsuits and concerns against healthcare practitioners and hospitals. Hospital administrators and practitioners' professional liability insurance organizations adopted risk management to predict and mitigate losses due to lawsuits and problems. In healthcare practice, risk management helps reduce medical errors and adverse cases, thus protecting the institution and physicians (Card, 2020). Consequently, Ekman (2022) asserts that ethical considerations or bioethics entail the moral obligations of the healthcare practitioner to the patient. For instance, in the case of the unconscious patient, the caregiver has a moral obligation to support the patient and ensure that whatever the husband and the parents decide is for the patient's health benefits. Ethics and risk management aim to promote patient experiences through pinpointing, analyzing, and solving ethical concerns with potential liability exposures.
There are various vital principles concerning medical ethics, including beneficence, justice, nonmaleficence, and autonomy. These principles relate to the case study of comatose car accident victims. Charity involves offering medical care in the patient's best interests, while nonmaleficence focuses on the code of mitigating harm. The autonomy principle observes the rights of the patient to have their pre...