Healthcare Marketing Ethical Concerns Research Paper

Ethical Concerns in Healthcare Marketing

The healthcare environment/setting is characterized by several ethical concerns or challenges, which have tremendous impacts on patients and their families as well as other stakeholders. The existence of numerous ethical concerns in the healthcare setting is attributable to the fact that nearly every decision made relating to delivery of patient care has ethical implications. The implications in turn have significant effects on patients, healthcare leaders, and healthcare providers. In the past few years, ethical concerns have characterized the healthcare setting because of the increased demands for accessibility and affordability of care as well as improved quality of care. These have become major factors in the healthcare setting because of the increase in patient populations and their demands.

One of the ethical concerns in the healthcare field is how to balance profits and the provision of healthcare to patients (Kreimer, 2010). While healthcare organizations have the basic mandate of providing healthcare to patients, they are also established to serve patients with different kinds of healthcare needs. Given the significant number of underinsured and uninsured populations, healthcare organizations are faced with the challenge of balancing the provision of care or focusing on profits. This is a major ethical concern, especially for for-profit healthcare organizations that provide patient care as a business. In essence, the provision of patient care services as a business is a major ethical concern because it challenges the established values, ideals, practices, and interests of the healthcare profession. The underlying issue in this ethical concern is whether healthcare organizations and providers should focus on profits or people i.e. patients and their families.

This ethical concern relates to healthcare marketing through generating issues on what should be the main focus of marketing initiatives in this profession. In essence, the issue of balancing profits versus people generates concerns on whether healthcare marketing strategies and initiatives should be established in a manner that focuses on profits or people. Healthcare marketers face this ethical concern because the increased commercialization of healthcare services has become controversial in the recent past (Andre & Velasquez, 2015). On one hand, the commercialization of patient care services is viewed as a means towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the health sector through increasing the role of entrepreneurs and competition. On the other hand, commercialization of these services to pursue profits is regarded as anti-ethical to the values and ideals of medicine. In…