Health Care Ethics Research Paper

What is Health Care Ethics? "Health care ethics at its simplest is a set of moral principles, beliefs, values that guide us in making choices about Medical care".(Cite) Health care ethics is a thoughtful observation of how to act while making morally good choices, based on beliefs and values about life, health, suffering, and death. Good ethics is "making good choices", but making good choices can sometimes end up not always being easy. Ethics is focused on the Medical decision that health care provider's make an appropriate decision. "In the U.S. four main principles define the ethical duties that health care professionals owe to patients. They are:
-Autonomy: to honor patients rights make their own decision
-Beneficence to help the patient advance his/her own good
-Nonmaleficence to do no harm
-Justice to be far and treat like cases alike".
(Vermont Ethics Network)
Medical Ethics not only deals with the way you should treat the patient physically, but also the type of personality you as a medical professional should have yourself. An ethical structure can help to layout medical professional values. For instance a virtue based approach might involve principles related to the development of good habits of character including:
Benevolence
Trustworthiness
Integrity
"In the 1950s medical errors were considered to be the price paid for modern diagnosis and therapy. But over the ensuing decades, medical errors have increased to epidemic proportions and currently are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Those in leadership roles claim that error reduction is extremely difficult due to the complex nature of healthcare facilities and the fact that patients are very sick. Our expanding awareness of this issue demands improvement in our understanding of the problem and in finding effective solutions and prevention strategies to make our healthcare system