Discuss legal and ethical obligations
Discussion: legal and ethical obligations
Discussion: legal and ethical obligations
Read Chapters 10 – 15 in your textbook and the case study on pg. 517.
Write a 1,200- to 1,500-word paper answering the following questions that are at the end of the case study on pg. 517.
1)What are the facts of this case?
2)What are the management implications of this case? What should management be doing to protect their employees?
3) If Rosemary had been injured, who would have been responsible? What if the visitor attacked another patient? What are the legal and ethical obligations GCH has to its employees and to its patients and how do they apply to this case?
4)What would be the optimum physical space for these patients? How much do you think it would cost to install a panic alarm in the patients’ rooms? At the nurse’s station? A safe room? What are the costs of doing nothing?
5) create an emergency plan for the staff in this unit while they await administration’s decision on renovations.
Reference your readings and include a minimum of 5 peer-reviewed, scholarly, or similar articles.
Format your paper according to APA guidelines.
Postgraduate education in ethical, professional, and legal obligations of clinical practice has been neglected with the result that the training of junior doctors in these matters is intermittent and incomplete. In order to remedy this failure, short sessions were held in our hospital every three weeks or so over a six month period during which a range of important topics was discussed. The sessions were informal, learner based, and problem based. The sessions were prepared with reference to readily available non-academic publications. While this series was planned for a general surgical unit, a similar series could easily be prepared for a different specialty.
Never before has the conduct of doctors been the object of such intense scrutiny by the media and the public, and no branch of medicine is immune from censure. Ethical standards are incorporated into the “Duties and responsibilities of doctors” produced by the General Medical Council (GMC),1 which form the core of our professional obligations. These are not statutory legal obligations as such but they do carry a good deal of weight in law since the GMC is itself a statutory body. In certain instances statute law is relevant; in many other instances common law and case law (precedent) guide medical practice. Although medical schools are obliged by the GMC to educate medical students in good ethical, professional and legal practice,2 many junior doctors lack confidence in these subjects. A Medline search found no useful literature on postgraduate education in ethical, professional, or legal matters.
As a specialist registrar working in a busy surgical unit at a medium sized district general hospital I felt it would be worthwhile to facilitate short sessions dealing with these subjects as part of the unit educational commitment. These informal discussions were geared towards trainees and included cases typical of those with which the unit dealt. The sessions took place every three weeks or so and soon gave rise to much lively debate among all the unit staff from house officer to consultant.
Throughout the series we kept to the basics of good clinical practice. The sessions were not meant to be a formal ethics and law course. Their purpose was to address common problems in general surgery.
The literature to which I refer is mostly readily available from the GMC and the medical defence organisations. The very lack of academic references is a bonus; any motivated practitioner can devise a similar programme for his/her own specialty with reference only to day-to-day experience and readily available non-academic literature. The following discussion topic is based on one of our sessions; a further four discussion topics will be published in the next four issues of this journal.
Topic 1: informed consent
An adult patient of sound mind has the right to refuse any treatment whatever the consequences.3 4 Unauthorised interference with a person is battery in law whether actual physical injury occurs or not.4 Handling of a patient must occur with consent. Consent may be implicit, for example, when a patient presents for examination or offers an arm for phlebotomy. Procedures performed under sedation or anaesthesia, or of a significantly invasive nature, are generally considered to require explicit written consent.
The legal concept of negligence is different; a practitioner is negligent when, having a duty of care, he/she has failed in that duty and as a consequence injury has arisen.5 As described in the GMC’sGood Medical Practice,1 a doctor has an ethical and professional duty of care for the patient, and to fulfil this duty that doctor must not only practice within the limits of his or her competence, but also inform the patient of possible adverse consequences.