HEALTH CARE

ETHICS
WHY ETHICS BECOME IMPORTANT?

• Nowadays, conflicts of interest between government and medical institutions, between medical
institutions and medical personnel, between physicians and patients are getting more serious
and complex.
• High technologies not only brought us hopes of cure but also created a heavy economic burden.
• The ethical dilemmas of brain death, organ transplantation and concerns about quality of life
have become increasingly important.
• A new and more specific ethics must be developed to meet the demands of social development
and medical service.
CONT …

• Integration of traditional medical ethics with modern principles and values.

ETHICS

• Ethics, derived from the Greek ethos, or “behavior” is concerned with

questions about right versus wrong conduct and what constitutes a good or
bad life, as well as the situations in which values conflict.
HEALTH ETHICS

• Health Ethics is the interdisciplinary field of study and practice that seeks specifically to
understand the values grounded in making decisions and actions in:
• 1. Health care
• 2. Health research
• 3. Health policy
• It also provides guidance for action when these values conflict.
ETHICS AND MORALITY

• The terms ethics and morality are often used interchangeably – indeed they usually can
mean the same thing and in casual conversation, there is no problem with switching
between one and the other.

• However, there is distinction between them in Philosophy.

ETHICS AND MORALITY

• Ethics and morals both relate to “right” and “wrong” conduct. However,
ethics refer to the series of rules provided to an individual by an external
source e.g. their profession. On the other hand, morals refer to an
individual’s own principles regarding right and wrong.
THE DEFINITION OF HEALTH CARE
INSTITUTIONS AND HEALTH PROFESSIONALS
• Health Care Institutions:
• The term “health care institution” shall include any hospital, convalescent
hospital, health maintenance organization, health clinic, nursing home,
extended care facility, or other institution devoted to the care of sick,
infirm, or aged person.
THE DEFINITION OF HEALTH CARE
INSTITUTIONS AND HEALTH PROFESSIONALS
• Health Professionals:
• Health professionals are conceived as “bureaucrats of health” who are entrepreneurs and
who see themselves as providing their clients with all legally available services regardless
of the health professional’s own personal moral views. Health care professionals will do
the best possible job for the lowest possible fee to attract more customers: It is once again
an ethic of “outward performance” rather than one of “inner intention”.
HEALTH ETHICS

• Health ethics has a broad focus, faced by health professionals, health policy makers and
health researchers.
• It also includes clinical care, health services and systems, public health, epidemiology,
information technology and the use of animals in research.
• For example, if authorities have a limited supply of vaccine, an ethical analysis of the
situation is likely to take into account clinical concerns about vaccine’s side effects,
epidemiological concerns about immunity and population risk and logistic concerns about
maintaining an effective and efficient delivery system.
HEALTH ETHICS

• Health ethics is increasingly on the curriculum in health professional and

bioscience training, as well as programs in health administration, health
economics, public health, law, biotechnology and environmental health.
However, it is a comparatively young field, there is an extensive and
growing international literature in the area, and many research efforts are
devoted to understand it.
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

• Professional Ethics are standards of conduct that apply to people who have a
professional occupation or role.
• A person who enters a profession acquires ethical obligations because society trusts them
to provide valuable services and goods that cannot be provided unless their conduct
conforms to certain standards.
• Professionals who fail to live up to their ethical obligations betray this trust.
• Professional ethics studied by ethicists include medical ethics.
MEDICAL CARE ETHICS

• Individual emphasis.
• Focuses on patient autonomy and best interest.
• Patient-focused values.
• Promoting cure and treatment of existing health conditions.
• Justice and duties to others, including public good, are never far away.
PUBLIC HEALTH ETHICS

• Measures designed to protect and enhance health of public and prevent ill-health.
• Emphasizes greater good of a population or community and pursuit of collective action.
• May be tension between duty to place rights and needs of individuals above those of
society.
• Since public is comprised of individuals, public health initiatives can result in benefits for
individuals too.
ETHICS VS LAWS

• 1. Ethics are rules of conduct.

• Laws are rules developed by governments in order to provide balance in society and
protection to its citizens.
• 2. Ethics comes from people’s awareness of what is right and wrong.
• 3. Laws are enforced by governments to its people.
• Ethics are moral codes which every person must conform to.
• Laws are codifications of ethics meant to regulate between society members.
ETHICS VS LAWS

• 4. Ethics does not carry any punishment to anyone who violates it.
• The laws will punish anyone who happens to violate it.
• 5. Ethics comes from within a person’s moral values.
• Laws are made with ethics as a guiding principle.