Legal and Ethical Principles in Health Care

Legal and Ethical Principles in Health Care

Case Scenario

A 96-year-old male patient suffering from terminal liver cancer is admitted to the ICU. He is confused, very weak and seems undernourished. He is covered with bruises, which are found commonly in such patients. His attendant is his daughter who is a naturopathic physician and is very persistent upon using her own techniques and methods of treatment on her father. The methods she applies on him are very painful. The care-taking staff is concerned about the patient that his health is deteriorating at higher speed because of his daughter.

Introduction

Ethics are the guiding principles of our actions. There is an absolute need to guide our actions with certain standards that would endeavour to produce better results of our actions. The foundation of ethics should be a well maintained standard of the values that should be incorporated in our daily situations as well as in emergency scenarios. The system and standard approach we follow while observing the ethics should be aimed at making the society a better place to live in (Rainbow, 2012).

Ethical Dilemma and its Dimensions

Ethical dilemma is a situation in which one sees no clear path to decide the course of actions. He is unable to decide that what should be done in order to resolve the problem and experience good results. The scenario described here is an example of ethical dilemma because this is a serious matter of life and death of a person and those who are appointed to provide care to the patients that is the nursing staff and the doctors are facing hindrance to take actions that are best for the patient because of unusual interference of his daughter.

Issues in Ethical Dilemma

In this scenario a number of issues are involved for the doctors and the nursing staff whose ultimate goal is to make the treatment and rest of the life easy for the old man if not save his life. Cancer itself is a very painful disease and the staff members are well aware of the measures they should take to improve the outcomes of the patient. The daughter of the patient is not letting the doctors do their duty freely and unnecessarily interfering in the treatment process.

She is not only interfering but the method she is adopting to treat her father is giving him acute pain. As the old man is already so weak and fragile, this pain would only worsen his condition instead of ding him any good. The staffs have to take care of the fact that the person they have to deal with is the daughter of the patient. Moreover, if anything happens to the patients this would only affect the reputation of the doctors not the daughter.

Method of Ethical Decision Making

To resolve the ethical dilemma like the one under consideration is very critical. In this ethical dilemma faced by the nursing staff it is important that they realize the circumstances of the situation (Secker, ...