HEALTH SECTOR ETHICS

Ethical Issues and Effective Information Governance in the Health Sector



Abstract

Malpractices in the healthcare sector can have extensively severe implications. As a result, it is imperative to highlight and understand the nature of these malpractices. The preliminary research revealed that governance of health information systems play a crucial role in the supplementation of malpractices in the healthcare sector. Although health care is primarily delivered to individual patients, health care ethics examines issues that relate to many stakeholders, including patients (first and foremost), families, providers, institutions, third party payers, and society. Ethics in health care can richly overlap with other areas of ethical enquiry such as organizational and business ethics, as well as research and public health ethics.

Ethical Issues and Effective Information Governance in the Health Sector

Introduction

Despite the fact, that a consensus on truth-telling practice has become the worldwide trend attitudes towards the truth-telling issue, related to the benefit or harm to the informed patient and strongly associated with social geographical and cultural issues. In the United Kingdom, concealment of diagnosis or prognosis from patients is still common, and not all patients informed of their diagnosis, and expected prognosis in clinical practice. Medical ethics are the moral principles which abide to the standards and judgments to the medical practice. They are articulated through various laws, professional organisational policies, institutional policies and practices and the professional standards of care. The medical and ethical issues mainly demand the dignity and respect for humans and their lives, gratitude of the inherent worth and the rights of confidentiality (Anand, 2004, pp.45-49).

As in other countries, some patients informed of the diagnosis other than the diseases the patients are suffering from, and others give ambiguous information without informing the patients about their disease. In a study, conducted in five U.K hospitals, physicians reported the provision of frank disclosure in survival that only accounts for 37%. More and more researchers in the United Kingdom pointed out that a discourse on guiding principles, other than the principle of protectiveness to safeguard patients' best interests, needed to help health care professionals to resolve the moral tension related to information concerning treatment decisions. Although recent studies showed that almost all patients wanted to know their diagnosis, prognosis, treatment plan, and side effects of treatment. Some authors argued that in oriental cultures, physicians or other care givers have the therapeutic privilege to decide how much information should be disclosed to patients, and this decision, made on the basis of the patients' cultural norms or their cautious judgment of how much harm this would do to the individual.

Discussion

Varied beliefs about the role of negative information may account for how disease-related information disclosed. As indicated in a population-based investigation; in the United Kingdom, the approximate position is that severely ill patients should not be informed of their actual conditions. When asked about the reasons for nondisclosure, the general public reported that it was primarily out of respect for the wishes of the family, or concern about their own ...