Unit 8: Lesson 5: Health Science Ethics

Lesson 5: Health Science Ethics

 

 

Lesson 5: Health Science Ethics

So far in this unit, we have focused on the legal mandates that affect the health science field. In addition to these laws and legal regulations, the health science field is also governed by medical ethics. Ethics is the process of standardizing and recommending choices of right and wrong. Coming from the field of philosophy, ethics involves questions of moral obligations and responsibilities. In the health sciences, ethics are strongly connected to the professional standards of conduct that govern the field.

There are two different types of ethics. Deontological ethics are those based on duty and obligation. These types of ethics are concerned with the rightness or wrongness of the behavior or action itself. Teleological ethics are those concerned with whether or not the outcome of the action or behavior produces a greater good. In other words, teleological ethics are more concerned with the outcome of an action than the action itself.

Consider the following situation. A person comes across an accident and stops to help. At the hospital, a nurse pulls the person aside and tells her that the person in the accident was HIV-positive. Deontological ethics would argue that this action was ethically wrong as the nurse broke the privacy and confidentiality expectations of the patient. Teleological ethics might argue that the action was ethically correct since the Good Samaritan would not have known otherwise that she had been exposed to HIV, and she might have unwittingly exposed others to the disease without this knowledge. As this situation shows, ethical decisions are not always easy ones to make. There are often multiple considerations, including cultural differences and the effects that decisions may have on different individuals, and the lines between right and wrong are not always clearly drawn.

Many health science professions aim to make ethical decisions easier for practitioners by establishing a code of ethics for professionals to follow. Healthcare settings may also establish an institutional code of ethics for their employees to follow.