BIOETHICAL ISSUES IN HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT

Prof V. Vidhya

Department of MBA

Sankara college of Science and Commerce

As the advancements in the medicine is increasing at high pace healthcare professionals are forced to deal with bioethical issues. It is about investigating and making healthcare decisions by applying principles of ethics to the medicine field. According to the Center for Practical Bioethics, the questions concerned with bioethics are, the right thing to do, worthwhile issues, obligations to one another, responsibility and moral grounds

Bioethics is a multidisciplinary field that combines philosophy, theology, history and law with medicine, nursing, health policy, and humanities. Healthcare system is complex and it enforces to consider issues from multiple points of view.

Bioethics is the combination of Biology with Bioscience with humanistic knowledge. Application of bioethics has become broader nowadays like clinical decision making, new research, acceptance of emerging new technologies, global concerns and public policy.  Bioethics affects both patients and care providers. Adelaide Centre for Bioethics and Culture has described that “Bioethics has an impact on every level of human community from the local nursing home to the huge international conferences on issues like the Human Genome … [It] is full of difficult ethical questions for everybody: families, hospitals, governments, and civilisation,”

Common Bioethical issues are End of life care, medical resource allocation, Eugenics, Euthanasia, and Organ donation.

End of life care:

Elderly people need more care especially when they are terminally ill. It becomes an issue for the family whether they need to take care them on hospital or in home setting. Even after taking care still if they are critical more it becomes an ethical issue whether we need to provide treatment or to cease it.

Medical resource allocation:

The ethical issue arises when medical resources are scarce. It will be difficult to meet all the healthcare needs due to scarce supply. One example is ICU’s. Patients need to be transferred out of ICU but not been transferred if they find some benefit out of ongoing monitoring. Ethics and reality of rationing in Medicine says that decisions like this can be made to accommodate the needs of more seriously ill patients who need access to limited space. Resource allocation on consultation can also be applied to determine which patient to be seen first and how much time to be allotted.

Eugenics

With advance technology it is said that through gene selection, gene manipulation we can improve the quality of gene. But it doesn’t mean that we have more choice and we can take advantage out of it. This becomes an ethical issue.

Euthansia

Euthansia is the controversial topic in Bioethics, as it is said that Euthansia is the termination of very sick person’s life in order to relieve from the suffering. In medical community there two types of euthanasia, active euthanasia is when the doctor allows the patient to die and passive euthanasia is when the doctors don’t do anything to make the patient alive. In both the cases it is done by getting consent from the patient’s family members.

Organ Donation

Ethical issue in Organ donation arises when there is demand for organ and the supply for suitable organ is less. It creates an ethical issue if the patients need to wait long for the donors for organs which can result in death. Bioethical issue is if we need to assess the organ donation to be voluntary or not.

Conclusion:

For leaders in the healthcare there is a need to create the ethical environment in the society to deal with the day-to-day challenges. The leaders should educate their employees to do the right thing when manager prioritize ethics, communicate clear expectations, and practice ethical decision making.