Ethical Issues In Health Care

Ethics is an understanding of the nature of conflicts arising from moral imperatives and how best we may deal with them. Specifically, it deals with conflicts in potential outcome (consequences of actions) or with duties and obligations. Ethics doesn't decide what is morally right or wrong; rather it considers how we should act best in the light of our duties and obligations as moral agents. Health ethics is the interdisciplinary field of study and practice that seeks specifically to understand the values undergirding decisions and actions in health care, health research and health policy, and to provide guidance for action when these values conflict. It is distinguishable from the narrower medical ethics, which is concerned with ethical issues that arise in the clinical context related to the care of specific patients, as well as the broader bioethics, which refers to ethical issues arising from the creation and maintenance of the health of all living things [1,2].
However, fewer studies have been done to evaluate the effectiveness of curriculum content on medical practice and physician-patient relationship [3-5]. Studies suggest that; integration of medical ethics education in these curricula, can lead to significant improvement in the knowledge and confidence of tomorrows' physicians in handling ethical dilemmas by providing them with essential skills to analyze and resolve these dilemmas. Further development of medical ethics education is needed to achieve the ultimate goal of shaping and supporting the positive professional growth of physicians and improving delivery of health care to patients, but in order to achieve this goal, medical ethics education should be directed at practical real-world dilemmas and ethically important professional developmental issues by physicians-in-training