Healthcare Ethical Issues

The delivery of healthcare mandates a lot of difficult decision making for healthcare providers as well as patients. For patients, much of the responsibility is left to them especially when serious health problems occur. This responsibility deals with what treatments could be accepted, what treatments could be continued, and what treatments could be stopped. Overall, it considers what route should be taken in regards to the health interests of the patient. However, there are circumstances in which patients cannot decide for themselves or communicate what they want in terms of their healthcare. This is where the ethical issue concerning who should be responsible for making these important healthcare decisions occur if a patient was to be in this sort of situation. Healthcare providers can play a role in the healthcare decision making as their duty is to act in the best interest of the patient.
Morrison & Furlong (2014) discusses that caregivers with practical wisdom, which by necessity includes being of good character or virtuous, will be able to make appropriate decisions about the means to ends. This has significant implications for healthcare ethics. When faced with ethical challenges in medical care, such caregivers will have the practical wisdom to know how to weigh the various issues and concerns and form a conclusion. (p.13)
Although healthcare providers are able to have some input in the decision making process in healthcare, they truly are not always aware of what their patients want. Only a patient has the responsibility to decide what direction according to their health that they want to go. It is a matter of choosing someone or something to lay out directives in case such a circumstance is to take place. Mo...

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...itten documents to be developed as an advanced directive. It primarily deals with deciding on when treatments and procedures that prolong life in circumstances where the patient is either terminally ill or in a persistent vegetative state should be started or discontinued (Types of Advanced Directives, 2011). The efforts of both state and federal influenced the development of advanced directives in the aspects of making end of life decisions. However, state made the first initiative (HHS, 2013). California began the first law that moved towards living wills.
HHS (2013) says that beginning the first wave of state legislation was the 1976 passage of the Natural Death Act in California, the first law to give legal force to living wills; soon thereafter, a number of states passed legislation authorizing instructional health care directives or “living wills. (para.5)