Ethics in a Long-Term Healthcare Business Ethics Essay

Ethics in a Long-Term Healthcare Business

Ethics in the health care industry spans a wide spectrum of activities and most of the obligations are cast by law on the professionals and the second by the common practice and morals of the profession. Both are important to the progress of the institution and also the health care industry. Compliance of statutes is of primary importance.

Compliance

There are many rules and statutes that must be complied with by all organizations and one such recent legislation is the hospital information access system. The HIPAA rules apply to all personnel in the system and extend to laboratory technicians, and lawyers and insurers. The culpability comes if the information was disclosed to a third party who did not have an association with the entity -- the clinic and was permitted to access the information. In such cases where the physician discloses information to another person who may be entitled to view the information then the issue of culpability does not arise. The privacy rule imposes conditions for the disclosure of medical information but it does not restrict the use of information or treatment, payment, and for public health purposes. (Chaikind, 2004)

Likewise The rules in "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 require that organizations will create policies and procedures to prevent unauthorized access to health care information. All persons who maintain and transmit health information apply reasonable technical and physical safeguards to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of such information and unauthorized uses or disclosures. However the existing problems of security of data are not yet fully overcome and the existing problems relating to patient record confidentiality and the impact of this law on the personnel. (May, 1998) The second aspect of the management task relates to the competence of the employees and processes.

Competence

The health care system plays with human life and therefore competencies that the professional care giver has is important. The approach to improving care begins with increasing the competencies that clinicians should possess. These must be in sync with the goals of empowerment and rehabilitation. Therefore one of the important aspects for the success of the program is clinician training, recruitment, and credentialing effort. This is because Individuals with severe mental illness often do not receive appropriate treatment or rehabilitation. (Young; et al., 2000)

Other than competence many ethical responsibilities not direct with professional competence is also required, for example avoiding personal entanglements and learn to deal with a multicultural setting, and improve their knowledge and be in sync with individual cases. In all they must at all times have a very high standard of moral, social and professional conduct. (Pratt; Gill; Barrett; Roberts, 2006) Then there are some specific issues like rationing and medial entanglements.

Rationing of Services

There are four common, basic "prima facie moral commitments -- respect for autonomy, beneficence, normal efficiency, and justice -- plus concern for their scope of application. It offers a common, basic moral analytical framework and a common, basic moral language." (Gillon, 1994) This must be the basis of rationing. This could take many forms, like age-based rationing and has to be attended with care. Rationing is a very much debated subject. The problems become acute when the nature of the problems change and we have to address…