ETHICS ISSUES IN HEALTH CARE PROFESSION

Ethics Issues In Health Care Profession

Ethics Issues In Health Care Profession

Introduction

Within the span of just the couple of decades we have seen dramatic change in the way moral issues in surgery are regarded and addressed. Up until the 1960s, medical ethics remained largely the matter of professional moral codes; today medical ethics has been swallowed up by bioethics, the new and broad area of societal debate engaging lawyers, ethicists, theologians, social workers and others. The “veto” on bioethical matters is now the shared professional house of many disciplines. How did this transformation take place and what are its significances for the way bioethical problems are framed and resolved?

In an effort to discover this change, most analysts have looked at the social context and cultural meaning of medical ethics ([Weisz, 1990, De Vries, 1995 and De Vries and Subedi, 1998]); they have studied why and how medical ethics developed and became bioethics ([Rothman, 1991 and Jonson, 1998]). For demonstration, in his investigation of trials with humans and the development of health ethics, Rothman focuses on the social context of the transformation of health ethics. He posits that in The United States—a society worried with 'underdogs'—we would anticipate special interest in the rights of research subjects to emerge. Rothman goes on to show how the anxiety with medical experiments engaging human beings served to attract many 'outsiders' to the area of medical research, encompassing jurists and ethicists.(Abbott,2009)

In contrast to Rothman and other similar studies, we study bioethics as the evolving area of several disciplines, in this case health care ethics and health law. We discover the relation between these two disciplines as they evolve rather than between disciplines and society. We consider bioethics as an arena of actors from distinct disciplines who create boundaries between 'good' and 'bad'. In particular we are interested in the way the interaction between the many disciplines of bioethics has shaped both the area and the way moral problems arrive to be defined. Our aim is on wellbeing care ethicists and wellbeing lawyers in the Netherlands. Using the Dutch euthanasia debate as the case study,2 we gaze at how these two disciplines/ professions managed their vying claims of competence and show how the particular moral issue interacts with the development of professions within bioethics.

The transformation from physician command of normative problems to shared command of these problems by the professions of bioethics can be understood as the contest over jurisdictional boundaries between professions. Abbott's form for the comparative and historical study of relations between professions presupposes that jurisdictional boundaries between professions are perpetually in dispute ([Abbott, 1988]). The notion of jurisdiction—defined as the connection between an occupation and its work—is an instrument to analyse professions as functioning in an interdependent system. Since one occupation can pre-empt another's work, the histories of occupations are inevitably interdependent.

 

Theoretical perspective

Our research shows that the delineation of euthanasia in the Netherlands is inextricably connected to the fates of the vying professions of health care ethics and health ...