Healthcare: Plato’s View Versus Modern Western Society People in today’s society have an immense number of expectations in regards to their quality of life. Perhaps the most prevalent is the expectation to the healthcare they choose. On the surface, it seems pretty clear cut. After all, why shouldn’t the individual patient be allowed to make choices that directly, or even indirectly, effect their general health? The waters become murky, however, when one takes into account the amount of resources allocated to providing some services or procedures to certain patients.
Patients expect that physicians and staff take every precaution available to protect their private information and maintain confidentiality. There is an ethical duty for health care employees to uphold a high standard of confidentiality, however in many situations breaches can easily happen whether unintentional or intentional. A case of an intentional breach of confidentiality with one physician happened at Longton Health Centre in Lancashire in the UK. Dr. Peter Robinson admitted to two breaches of confidentiality, one such incident in which he openly discussed a patient’s sexual problems in a letter to a friend and another breach happened when he revealed to his girlfriend in an email that one of his patients was using Viagra. There was a 3 day hearing in Manchester and the doctor openly admitted to the breaches and was very apologetic for them.
These abbreviations certainly save time and can expedite care, but they can also cause a multitude of problems. Abbreviations for differing medicines can be mistaken, Medical errors are typically caused by illegible writing and misrepresentations of some types of abbreviations when providing treatments or filling a prescription. As a result health care agencies, such as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations have required hospitals and other medical facilities to create a list of unacceptable abbreviations. Many facilities are also discouraging the use of abbreviations in medical records and documentation. Standardization is paramount and will require practice changes for all healthcare providers.
When ensuring that every patient receives quality care there are several things we must consider such as healthcare costs, medical technology, and most of all the credentials of physicians chosen to render services to patients. All these things play a key role in providing quality healthcare. First there is the insurance part of our healthcare system and many are concerned about the rising cost in healthcare. Managed care companies are collecting more in premiums but yet paying less for services rendered to it is members. Most people have a managed healthcare plan through an employer or self employment.
People go to the hospital in order to get better from whatever ailment is troubling them. Healthcare workers should give no less than an excellent quality of care towards the patients. Being lax about cleanliness lowers this quality of care and puts everyone in danger. Unfortunately, not all hospitals adhere to strict cleanliness rules and as a result, the number of HAIs are increasing with the U.S. Department
Ethical Breaches in Healthcare Healthcare is a very important factor in an individual’s life and they want to ensure that any information about their medical information is private and confidential. Although most wouldn’t think that professionals in healthcare wouldn’t break ethical codes, sadly there are several situations where this has happened, and even sadder is the fact that it will probably continue to happen throughout the years. I have researched ethical breaches that have occurred within the past five years and chose three that I found were the most unethical in my opinion. Let’s get started and look at these ethical breaches in more depth. This first ethical breach I read about was an ethical breach by a laboratory located in Boston that was defrauding the government out of millions of dollars.
There are a lot of pros and cons of pay-for-performance in health care (see appendix for charts.) the chart will show what people think about pay-for-performance and the good they think it does for the health care system but it also shows the cons what people think is wrong with the pay-for-performance program. However, many are not satisfied by pay-for-performance including congress who are not on board with the Medicare reimbursement because the policy relies on the evidence-based medicine it is used to developed a “clinical practice guidelines and compensate health care providers according to their compliance with the best practices dictated by a
The first dilemma involves the doctors of Health Net i.e. Dr Gupta, Dr. Schinke and Dr. McMillan wherein they have an interest in keeping the costs per patient within the capitation fee so that they can either earn extra income or avoid having to pay money to cover the extra costs above the capitation fee, while on the other hand they have a duty as doctors to provide the best possible treatment that gives Christy a chance to overcome her illness regardless of the costs involved. The second dilemma involves UCLA Medical Clinic’s Cancer unit who could possibly lose an extremely profitable business relationship with Health Net thus putting them in a financial crisis if they allowed the transplant to occur but on the other hand they had already agreed to give Christy a transplant and not doing so under pressure from Health Net would be immoral and could possibly open them to a potential lawsuit by Christy and her family. Common Sense Morality: With regards to Health Net and some of their doctors like Dr. Gupta and Dr. McMillan, they have certainly violated the ideals of ‘Common Sense’ morality which consists of being honest, fair and doing no harm to the parties involved. They were not honest to Christy when they deemed her treatment to be “Investigational” whereas it was a pretense to keeping their costs below the capitation fee since the bone marrow transplant would cost $100,000.
Jerry was accused of a medical malpractice because of prescribing a refill without the authorization of a physician. There were many legal and ethical issues that affected the decision Jerry made in ordering the prescription refill, and the knowledge of right and wrong deterred Jerry from deciding to refill the prescription. There are several methods and types of values at hand that Jerry could have used to help him make an ethical decision. Determining the appropriate course to take when faced with a difficult ethical dilemma can be a challenge, but it is always important to engage in a carefully considered ethical decision-making. Everyday health care workers around the world are faced with tough decisions.
Number of patients admitted for pressure ulcers cannot be controlled but hospital-acquired pressure ulcers can. The National Quality Forum (NQF) a non-profit organization with the support from CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) have developed a list with serious and costly healthcare errors called “never events.” These errors which include stage III and stage IV pressure ulcers may cause serious injury or death to the patient and result in increased cost. The Joint Commission has implemented National Patient Safety goals to monitor specific interventions and outcomes. The regular use of a validated risk assessment tool to identify high risk patients in order to prevent injury is an example of a safety goal. The Joint Commission also tracks information on “sentinel events which result in unanticipated death or permanent loss of function.” These sentinel events refer to loss of function due to pressure ulcers.