DQ 3-2

The healthcare study that I chose was a study on ethical challenges within the Veterans Administration healthcare facilities between managers, clinicians, patients, and ethics committee chairpersons. A select number of people from each group were picked to discuss the ethical challenges that they are facing within these facilities and to identify factors that contributed to these challenges. The biggest issue that was found was the allocation of resources across a facility’s programs and services. Many of the managers felt that they were in an unenviable position of making decisions that privileged the needs of some patients over others, without a normative framework to guide them (Foglia, Pearlman, and Bottrell, 2009). Doing that is a violation of informed consent because managers were doing this without the patients knowing which is why beneficence was included in the Title 45, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 46, Protection of Human Subjects (Neutens and Rubinson, 2014). This is also a violation of beneficence because this act is not promoting the patient in a positive way. Truth telling and deception is hard because although deception in medicine is wrong, the obligation of complete honesty to patients is not absolute (Scully, 2017). For instance, a patient may be put at a higher priority that another patient but the clinicians do not have to fully disclose why to the other party. This case is common for transplant lists which is a service that Veterans Administration healthcare facilities provide. All patients should be treated ethically under ethical standards under law and patients have the right to have full disclosure with anything they have consented to, including healthcare services. 

References

Foglia, M. B., Pearlman, R. A., & Bottrell, M. (2009). Ethical Challenges Within Veterans Administration Healthcare Facilities: Perspectives of Managers, Clinicians, Patients, and Ethics Committee Chairpersons. American Journal Of Bioethics, 9(4), 28-36.

James J. Neutens, L. R. (2014). Research Techniques for the Health Sciences (5 ed.). San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings.

Scully, K. (2017). Truth telling and the doctor-patient relationship. Retrieved from American Academy of Dermatology: https://www.aad.org/members/publications/directions-in-residency/archivend-the-doctor-patient-relationship