Abstract
This research paper focuses on a case study of a patient confidentiality violation, but it also empowers an exploration into some of the important facets related to ethical, legal, and professional considerations in the domain of healthcare. This study shows the major problems resulting from poor information management and unethical behavior within the medical context. The paper also discusses legal consequences for healthcare providers and how this breaks HIPAA standards. It has strict guidelines on the handling of patient information with informed consent, with recommendations to raise ethical standards and improve information management through contemporary technological solutions such as password-protected databases and secure communication platforms. Healthcare businesses are able to reduce the risks to patients’ privacy and maintain high standards of moral behavior while legally going about their operations by considering the above considerations.
Introduction
Medical law, ethics, and professional practice are important in healthcare because they regulate, enact, and govern ethical conduct involving the medical profession. As Weed postulates, the mentioned elements ensure that patients, their families, society, and doctors have the capacity to address matters involving health and make crucial decisions.
In the case of the 80-year-old male who is to have surgery, he became more vulnerable due to the absence of medical care and periodic bleeding in his original residence. He himself is also to be blamed a little for his vulnerability, as he did not realize his critical condition and get proper treatment. He was even more vulnerable when the medical professionals were unable to diagnose colon cancer. Some ethical issues that have bogged this case down are the lack of beneficence, while on the other hand, the practitioners were not short of non-maleficence in engaging the patient with primary treatments whose diagnosis was ranged as uncertain.
What their practice failed to uphold are some of the medical principles, such as competence, disclosure, inter-professional communication, and negligence, as Pullman (2005 puts it. Further, professional standards and accountability were lacking. The diagnosis of the illness was supposed to be proper, and the prescription of the proper treatment to be accorded to her rested with the practitioners, but that was never the case.
Legally, the case raises a number of issues, such as poor inter-professionalism, insufficiency in sharing information, negligence, and failure to have legally acceptable and secure outcomes. This paper will depict the ethical, legal, and professional considerations after analyzing the case of a 67-year-old gentleman who is due to go for surgery due to colorectal cancer. Finally, the issues will be analyzed.
Law
In professional health practice, medical law details the rights and duties of the medical practitioner and patients’ rights. The central areas of medical law, as articulated by McKeon in 2002, include confidentiality, negligence, and torts against medical treatment.
From the case, it clearly shows that the duty of care has not been fully achieved as the condition of the patient was diagnosed late. The doctor violated the legislative act of the medical board that ensures that practitioners prevent harm by making sure healthcare or medication is given professionally, safely, and competently. This case is a form of breach of health care duties and involves a high level of negligence as well as being against the laws of medical negligence. According to Mathews (2005, medical negligence can be practiced in many ways, like failing to diagnose a condition, delays in diagnosis, and not performing duties competently. Other legal issues in this case include failure to institute timely and proper treatment, failure to refer the patient to a competent specialist, and failure to conduct and report investigations accurately.
Therefore, the patient had every right and due course to initiate litigation against the practitioners with an eye on compensation based on negligence and professional misconduct. Though the law appreciates that medical professionals, at times, have to make difficult decisions while under pressure, negligence is different from mere errors or reasonable mistakes. Negligence occurs when it is proven that the level of care administered to a person was below the standard for which a similarly placed medical professional should implement (Mathews, 2005). This case clearly borders on professional negligence and unprofessional medical practice.
Ethics
“Doctors have an ethical duty to promote and preserve their patients’ health because of their special knowledge and skill” (Edwards, 2002). In this case, the patient trusted the practitioners to deliver proper treatment considering his helpless state.
However, in view of the helpless condition the patient was left in, the code of ethics was not properly maintained. As per the Australian Medical Association, 2010, general practitioners and private surgeons failed to carry out ethical duties effectively, as evidenced by their inability to diagnose the patient’s illness precisely.
The beneficence was not upheld here since it is one of the basic principles in medical ethics. None of the two medical practitioners did anything that tended to secure the well-being of the patient, nor did their actions serve the best interests of the patient.
The autonomy was also overlooked, for nothing in this case helped the patient exercise his health autonomy. The practitioners did not help in healthy decision-making for the patient. That means they have violated this principle too.
The other issue here is non-maleficence. Nothing seemed to have protected the patient from any harm; on the other hand, the professional activities of the practitioners increased the vulnerability of the patient instead of decreasing it.
Given his vulnerability, the patient only entrusted the practitioners with effective treatment by virtue of their expertise. The practitioners did little to help him but added to his vulnerability. Hence, they did not act in accordance with the principles of their operations.
Related issue
Identifying the step that made the drastic consequences relatively easy—had the nurse not mixed up the telephone numbers, the situation would never have occurred. However, this would be an exaggeration if all of the blame were pushed on the nurse. This case represents a severe shortage of the knowledge management system within the setting of the hospital.
It began with the nurse deciding to operate with the patient’s personal information without consulting him. Although the case starts by describing the tense conversation that Sue had with the nurse, it’s apparent that the nurse’s irritation and way of talking to Sue were founded on the poor ethical principles that guided the hospital staff. The subsequent poorly managed step was the inability to resolve the conflict between the patient and the hospital staff. Making Sue responsible for the job was another blunder; in fact, Sue could have kept track of the patients through staff communication to understand the problem. Thus, the tiny weakness in the hospital’s ethics began to grow and ultimately turned into a Bundaberg blogger lawsuit.
Recommendations
To prevent such incidents in the future, the hospital management must:
Review the hospital’s ethics.
Enhance the management of information among the staff.
Use the new media as one of the key tools for hands-off communication among nurses. Enhance the protection of private information about the patient.
Apart from that, there should also be a mechanism in which confirmation is acquired regarding the receipt of notifications of orders and the completion of processes or tests.
To organize clinical documentation effectively, new types of information management tools must be implemented. In the current information technological age, there is rapid importance of informational technologies for the proper functioning of knowledge management. Given a healthcare system like Sue’s, it is only common sense to utilize up-to-date information technologies for the better protection of information. The examples include developing a password-protected database accessible to staff only. Besides, new media should be utilized for hands-off communication among nursing specialists to prevent this kind of misunderstanding Sue has faced and Dunia’s personal information from being disclosed. Moreover, the health staff should not commit any act of revealing personal information about a patient without their full and prior consent.
Conclusion
To sum up, sorting out the ethical, legal, and professional dilemmas in the given health care case requires a multi-dimensional approach. In fact, the hospital has to revamp its code of ethics and redesign the flow of information. The utilization of the latest information technologies will make it difficult to allow a leak in the information, therefore reducing the effects of misconception. Such new media will include a secure staff communication tool and a password-protected database to prevent any leakage of information. Thirdly, it will be imperative that the handling of patient information be done based on informed consent. This adds up to the security of patient data, staff coordination, the expansion of ethical and legal dimensions, and the maintenance of standards prerequisite to quality health practice.
BlogReferences
1. Edwards, M. (2002) Medical Care, and Ethics. Journal of medical ethics 6(3), pp. 41-48.
2. Hoffman, T. 2009. Clinical professional guidelines. Web.
3. Leaper, M, & Johnstons, MJ. (2004) Reasons for failure to diagnose colorectal carcinoma at colonoscopy. Endoscopy 36(2), pp.499-503.
“Credit: Nandini Achhra
Course- BA LLB(H)
College – Vivekananda institute of professional studies
Year- 3rd”