Exploring Ethical Principles in Healthcare

Ethical principles in healthcare are significant to the building blocks of mortality. The principles are beneficence, autonomy, justice, and nonmaleficence. Although these principles can be certainly followed they can also be disregarded. Beneficence is a theory that assures each procedure given is entirely beneficial to that patient to help them advance within their own good. For example, There was a young girl, the age of 17. She had been being treated at a small private practice since she was born. She was recently diagnosed with lymphoma and was only given a few more years to live. Her doctors at the private practice who had been seeing her for years were very attached to her and wanted to grant this dying girl her every wish. They promised

This procedure would have been of no benefit to the patient so the principle beneficence was not followed. The new doctor at the practice brought to the other doctors’ attention that this procedure was outrageous and would be of no good to the patient or the family. After consideration the other doctors realized they were too emotionally attached to deny the patient of her wish, so they needed to tell her the procedure was canceled. And this is where paternalism comes into play. Paternalism is when a doctor has to put a foot down when a patient is demanding a procedure that is more harmful to them than good (the patient just can’t see it). Doctors are always in the best interest for the patient expect for when paternalism is involved. Sometimes even though a patient is proven mentally competent a doctor has to do what they feel is the right thing to do for the patient even if is overruling the patients decisions. A way to of having benefited the cancer patients of having a baby possibly could have been just taking her to visit some babies to get the feel of what it could be like to be a mothers not actually giving her one of her own to be raised without a mother. Nonmaleficence is a principle that assures a procedure or decision is doing no harm to the

Justice is a complex principle, it assures that distribution of benefits and resources are fair among all patients. It also ensures equality throughout the hospital. Within the ethics principal Justice, are five conceptualizations, to each; an equal share, according to need, according to effort, according to contribution, according to merit. An example of to each, an equal share would be, if there were four patients in need of a certain type of ankle brace but the hospital only have three that could be used, they could not just give 3 patients and brace and let one go without because that would be injustice. So the doctors would have to order a new brace and wait until all 4 have arrives or the doctors would have to find a different solution for all four patients to be equally benefited. An example of to each, according to need, would be there are 2 patients, one patient is able to walk with a walker and the other patient is able only able to move around in a wheel chair, the doctors would have to decide if it would be more of the a justified beneficial need to get the patient who can use a walker one and a wheelchair for the other