Healthcare Ethical Issues
In the health care field there are many ethical issues that arise. But in healthcare, ethical issues are very common. Almost every decision has an ethical implication either for the primary provider, the patient, or the healthcare administrator. As stated by Larson (2013) issues such as balancing care quality and efficiency, improving access to care, building and supporting the healthcare workforce, addressing end of life situations, and dealing with limited medications and donor organs are most likely to be encountered by a healthcare administrator.
Ethical issues and conflicts are universal in today’s modern healthcare setting, but many times healthcare administrators and healthcare personnel face moral distress. Moral distress as stated …show more content…
by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (2016), “… is a serious problem in nursing which contributes to nurses feeling a loss of integrity and dissatisfaction with their work environment.” Moral distress can be neutralized by having a strong support team that has several strategies implemented to address certain issues such as supporting the nurses code of ethics, offer ongoing education, create an environment where healthcare professionals can speak up, bring different disciplines together, provide ethics experts, add unit based ethics mentors, hold a family conference, sponsor ethics journals or book clubs, reaching out to other professional associations, and offering employee counseling services.
At times healthcare administrators lack the training of how to neutralize ethical issues which affect the overall patient care as well as employee stress and job burnout. As stated in 10 Best Practices for Addressing Ethical Issues and Moral Distress by Wood (2014, para 2), “Our challenge isn’t to eliminate moral distress; it is becoming part of our new normal and not going away, so our new goals have become learning how to recognize and address it effectively,” said Ramon Lavandero, RN, MA, MSN, FAAN, senior director of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and clinical associate professor at Yale University School of Nursing. “Healthcare leaders can start by helping clinicians learn how to recognize moral distress and point them to resources to help address it.”
No matter the amount of training or support healthcare administrators receive, there needs to be an emphasis on overall global ethics.
There needs to be a set of universal ethics that everyone can refer to. As stated by Lynch (2001, para 3), Peter L. Cruise talks about, “… enhanced standards, informed by virtue and ethics and utilized by independent bodies (such as the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of HealthCare Organization or JCAHO) during the health care organization accreditation process, offer a better alternative than the current retributive approach.” What needs to happen is that JCAHO does not only need to accredit the hospital but provided universal ethical and moral strategies that healthcare professional need to help ease the weight off them in moral distress. Looking deeper and deeper into ethical situations, one may think it is easy to come up with a solution but what is the solution comes at a risk. Such as a hospital administrator finding out that the hospital they are working in is barely staying afloat financially, due to moving people, who are willing to pay cash to be on top of the organ donor list. What does one do when a situation is presented like this? There are a serious of issues that are presented in this dilemma, from it being ethically wrong does the healthcare administrator resign, leaving the hospital as is or to come clean to the public and threaten to shut down the hospital which results in many losing health care as well as jobs? Ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, equality, and equity all play a role. If that healthcare administrator is following the principles of health care ethics, then the solution is clear which is to do an investigation and figure out why the hospital is in financial distress and to present a number of strategies to better the hospital care and to make it run efficiently, without it being shut down. Looking at the bigger picture is the key during ethical
dilemmas and to work with an open mind with all the evidence presented.
All in all, the lack of policies and strategies is a problem for healthcare professionals that is causing moral distress which effects patient health to decision making. As stated by Lynch (2001, para 2) “He notes that such decisions are made from a person’s inner sense of morality which directly affects ethical behavior. Thurs, morality is the result or long-term, irreversible cognitive development and the most dominant determinant of overall ethical behavior.” No matter what, there are many ethical issues that arise but with a better understanding of the strategies to help neutralize the situation is the key to promote a balance in care quality and efficiency.
Ethical issues and conflicts are universal in today’s modern healthcare setting, but many times healthcare administrators and healthcare personnel face moral distress. Moral distress as stated …show more content…
by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (2016), “… is a serious problem in nursing which contributes to nurses feeling a loss of integrity and dissatisfaction with their work environment.” Moral distress can be neutralized by having a strong support team that has several strategies implemented to address certain issues such as supporting the nurses code of ethics, offer ongoing education, create an environment where healthcare professionals can speak up, bring different disciplines together, provide ethics experts, add unit based ethics mentors, hold a family conference, sponsor ethics journals or book clubs, reaching out to other professional associations, and offering employee counseling services.
At times healthcare administrators lack the training of how to neutralize ethical issues which affect the overall patient care as well as employee stress and job burnout. As stated in 10 Best Practices for Addressing Ethical Issues and Moral Distress by Wood (2014, para 2), “Our challenge isn’t to eliminate moral distress; it is becoming part of our new normal and not going away, so our new goals have become learning how to recognize and address it effectively,” said Ramon Lavandero, RN, MA, MSN, FAAN, senior director of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and clinical associate professor at Yale University School of Nursing. “Healthcare leaders can start by helping clinicians learn how to recognize moral distress and point them to resources to help address it.”
No matter the amount of training or support healthcare administrators receive, there needs to be an emphasis on overall global ethics.
There needs to be a set of universal ethics that everyone can refer to. As stated by Lynch (2001, para 3), Peter L. Cruise talks about, “… enhanced standards, informed by virtue and ethics and utilized by independent bodies (such as the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of HealthCare Organization or JCAHO) during the health care organization accreditation process, offer a better alternative than the current retributive approach.” What needs to happen is that JCAHO does not only need to accredit the hospital but provided universal ethical and moral strategies that healthcare professional need to help ease the weight off them in moral distress. Looking deeper and deeper into ethical situations, one may think it is easy to come up with a solution but what is the solution comes at a risk. Such as a hospital administrator finding out that the hospital they are working in is barely staying afloat financially, due to moving people, who are willing to pay cash to be on top of the organ donor list. What does one do when a situation is presented like this? There are a serious of issues that are presented in this dilemma, from it being ethically wrong does the healthcare administrator resign, leaving the hospital as is or to come clean to the public and threaten to shut down the hospital which results in many losing health care as well as jobs? Ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, equality, and equity all play a role. If that healthcare administrator is following the principles of health care ethics, then the solution is clear which is to do an investigation and figure out why the hospital is in financial distress and to present a number of strategies to better the hospital care and to make it run efficiently, without it being shut down. Looking at the bigger picture is the key during ethical
dilemmas and to work with an open mind with all the evidence presented.
All in all, the lack of policies and strategies is a problem for healthcare professionals that is causing moral distress which effects patient health to decision making. As stated by Lynch (2001, para 2) “He notes that such decisions are made from a person’s inner sense of morality which directly affects ethical behavior. Thurs, morality is the result or long-term, irreversible cognitive development and the most dominant determinant of overall ethical behavior.” No matter what, there are many ethical issues that arise but with a better understanding of the strategies to help neutralize the situation is the key to promote a balance in care quality and efficiency.