Ethical Issues and Decision a Making in a Healthcare Facility: Honesty and Comptetence

Grinnell Regional Medical Center (GRMC) is a rural hospital that is located in east central Iowa (Grinnell Regional Medical Center, 2014a). GRMC is the largest hospital between two of the larger cities along interstate-80 (Grinnell Regional Medical Center, 2014a). This hospital has been around since 1919 and has grown throughout the years (Grinnell Regional Medical Center, 2014a). There are approximately 400 employees, 50 physicians and advanced practice practitioners, as well as 200 volunteers that take part in making GRMC what it is today (Grinnell Regional Medical Center, 2014a). GRMC is dedicated to “Health Care for Life” (Grinnell Regional Medical Center, 2014b) by providing:

A medical office administrative assistance must know the importance of proper medical documentation,the legal aspects of documentation and the various medical laws, regulations, and acts; understand language and other communication barriers, proper billing and reimbursement procedures, workplace conflict and diversity; and know how to properly maintain patient ledger cards. Accurate medical documentation ensures the patient receives the proper treatment and aides in validating medical necessity. This documentation is not only critical to the patient but the facility as well because it ensures proper codes are assigned, clean claims are submitted, and allows the reimbursement process runs smoothly. Medical office administrative assistants must understand the imporatance in protecting patient privacy because they have an ethical and legal

Instead of numbering patients from 1-3 and leaving #3s (DNR patients) to die, health care providers could have done same thing as the other hospital in New York. Just because these patients had DNR does not mean the health professionals take away the patients’ autonomy and hasten their death. If they had not numbered the patients and had evacuated all patients equally regardless of their health conditions then some of them may have survived. The medical professionals take a Hippocratic oath to do no harm do the patients, yet some of them at Memorial Hospital gave extra morphine and sedative to the patients. Where was non-maleficence? I mean how is someone destined

Individual ethics are important in decision-making within the health care industry. One of the main reasons for that is because often ethical dilemmas occur at lower decision-making levels, and this means that the decision is being made by one person, facing a difficult situation that must be resolved quickly. Another reason that individual ethics are important in health care is that often a manager is unaware that there is an ethical dilemma. Thus, by failing to recognize the ethical dilemma, the manager is resolving the dilemma by his or her actions without realizing that an ethical decision is being made (Mintz, 2011). This very much puts the individual's ethical compass at the center of the decision, because the default decision is the one that is being made, regardless of the ethical implications. If the person is generally ethical, the decision will probably be the right one; if the person lacks ethical standards, the decision could be very poor as result.

As a Healthcare administrator there are many different challenges to be faced. Being the backbone of any company in general is a hard but rewarding task. On a day-to-day basis healthcare administrators have to deal with the bulk of the problems wherever they work. The people in these positions deal with things ranging from unethical doctors, to hiring and firing the janitor. The topic this paper is going to focus on is the type of issues healthcare administrators deal with when going through the process of employment for their doctors.

Ethics are a set of moral principles that serve as a guiding philosophy for behavior. Consequently it is not a surprise that ethical dilemmas occur daily in the health care setting. Any nurse who refuses to provide care for a patient faces an ethical dilemma (Kuhn, 2012, pp. 412-418). The reasons given for refusal range anywhere from a conflict of personal values to fear of personal risk of injury. Nurses do have the right, at times, to refuse patient care assignments. The decision to accept or reject an assignment must be based upon a judgment by the nurse of the nurse 's ability to provide competent patient care. This paper aims to show both sides of the argument when it comes to nurses refusing a patient assignment. One side believes that nurses has the right to refuse patient assignment, as they must be true to themselves if they want to perform their best on the job. On the other hand, the other side believes that it is the nurse’s responsibility to care for all patients and, therefore nurses cannot simply refuse a patient.

The following ethics program will highlight some key ethical issues facing the healthcare industry as a whole, as well as hospice agencies specifically. In this program, I will reference ethical principles used today as well as reference historical ethicists and philosophers that backup the items outlined in this ethics program. There are two major topics to be discussed. The first will be how to treat patients that are at the end of their life, which includes their loved ones as well. A specific issue to be addressed in terms of patient care will be the option of doctor-assisted suicide, often called euthanasia, and why hospice should not support this. The other issue is that of data security and privacy, and how all patient information should be handled in the healthcare environment.

The healthcare system is an institution that delivers health care to the populations in need of medical care. The healthcare’s personnel are well trained and have dedicated their lives to providing health care to everyone who enters the institution. They are engaged to provide care to each person regardless of their disease, age, sex, social class or the stage of their illness, even if they are constrained by the careful use of the resources available. But sometimes, in extreme emergencies (wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods) where there are not enough medications, medical supplies or even limited resources for evacuation, some patients have to die, while others will get the care they need to live. That’s exactly what happened in 2005, at New Orleans’ Memorial Hospital after the passage of Hurricane Katrina. “After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Doctors made ad hoc decisions about which group of patients to evacuate from hospitals when flood waters rose, the power failed and the heat climbed” (Fink, 1). The next lines will focus on some bioethical principles implicated, the advantages and disadvantages of using a utilitarian theory, the most moral theory, and whether the clinicians profiled achieved an ethical outcome in the case of Memorial Hospital.

Healthcare professionals will be faced with ethical dilemmas throughout their career, particularly in the hospital environment. Having an education regarding professional healthcare ethics will provide some direction in how to best address these dilemmas at a time when either the patient or their family is in need of making decisions for themselves or their family member. It can be difficult for healthcare professionals to weigh professional protocol against their own personal beliefs and ethical understandings when determining critical care for their patient.

New innovations are being created every year to help improve and protect patients from reckless and preventable errors. As healthcare providers, it is our duty to provide care ethically and to do no harm to our patients. On the contrary, “the culture of cover-up” still continues to exist today and although technology and informatics has progressively increased quality care, it has not completely eradicated errors. Integrity is the key component for every healthcare provider, along with other characteristics. Therefore, disclosing medical errors with our patients is imperative and our patients and their families deserve to know what occurred during their time of care. Technology is not able to prevent every mishap that causes patients harm (Gibson & Singh, 2003). On the other hand, communication and learning from the mistake can. As Gibson and Singh (2003) so eloquently stated, “…wise people learn form their mistakes, and those who don’t are bound to repeat

Professionals in all fields experience ethical problems especially in health care. In fact, ethical issues arise in government, industry, science, and academia (Steneck, 2004). Ethical issues can be see in every decision making process which often involves competing goals and motives (Werhane, 2002) Ethical decision making (EDM) requires a number of complex cognitive processes in which people must assess the effectiveness of alternative courses of action in the context of their understanding of the problem and the relevant rules and guidelines involved (Miner & Petocz, 2003). Occupational therapists (OT) have increased autonomy to meet the clients and provide unrestricted practice in today's healthcare

Everyday, healthcare professionals are faced with ethical dilemmas in their workplace. These ethical dilemmas need to be addressed in order to provide the best care for the patient. Healthcare professionals have to weigh their own personal beliefs, professional beliefs, ethical understandings, and several other factors to decide what the best care for their patient might be. This is illustrated in Mrs. Smith’s case. Mrs. Smith is an 85 year old who has suffered from a large stroke that extends to both of her brains hemispheres which has left her unconscious. She only has some brain stem reflexes and requires a ventilator for support. She is unable to communicate how she wishes to proceed with her healthcare. Mrs. Smith’s children, Sara and Frank have different views regarding their mother’s plan of care. The decision that needs to be made is whether to prolong Mrs. Smith’s life, as Sara would like to do, or stop all treatments and care, as Frank feels his mother would want. In the healthcare field, there are situations similar to this case that happen daily where moral and ethical judgment is necessary to guide the decision that would be best for the patient. The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss, compare and contrast the personal and professional values, ethical principles, and legal issues regarding Mrs. Smith’s quality of life and further plan of care.

The ethical decision making process is based on moral rules and unchanging principles that are derived from reason and can be applied universally. These universal rules and principles must be considered separate from the consequences or the facts of a particular situation. (McWay, 2014). Health care workers face ethical issues and have to use the ethical decision making process to determine what is best for their patients.

For this assignment, I spent time volunteering at Mercy Downtown, helping at the main information desk. While I was there, I assisted visitors in finding patients by looking up their room number, directed patients and visitors to the correct area of the hospital, and delivered flowers to rooms that had been dropped off. A paid employee also accompanied me while there, as volunteers are not allowed to actually look up patient information via the online portal, but I could call a different help desks within the hospital to ask other paid employees to look patients up for me if needed. The experience made me realize that there are so many little unthought of components to making a hospital as big as Mercy be efficient for everyone. The information

Nurses often encountered various ethical dilemmas in the practice setting. Both virtue ethics and caring ethics support good ethical decision making for nurses (Park, 2012, p. 149) but these are inadequate to assist in solving an ethical dilemma (Park, 2012, p. 149). For that reason an ethical decision making tool is helpful for the nurses or clinicians to come up with an ethical decision (Kelly, 2012, p. 571) that allows them to gather information, identify any gap of understanding on the issue or the disagreements between the involved parties through a clear communication (Park, 2012, p. 140). Several authors presented an ethical decision making processes (Park, 2012, p. 141), here presented the two processes that can be applied in resolving an ethical dilemma. One example of ethical decision making process is the DECIDE model by Thompson, Melia & Boyd (Allen, Chapman, Francis, & O’Connor, 2008, p. 5) and the Integrated ethical decision-making model which was derived from the combination of the different ethical decision-making models strengths (Park, 2012, p. 140). These two ethical decision-making model steps are identical to each but differ on the detailed instruction on how the steps are to be done or used in actual case. By comparing the two models the integrated ethical decision-making model have a detailed instruction. The