LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES
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This essay demonstrates the local and professional code of ethic conduct. It also demonstrates the inherency of ethical code. The code of ethics has broad guidelines on how workers can act as well as detailed instructions for dealing with problems such as discrimination, protection, and conflicts of interest (Garwood-Gowers, 2019). A code of ethics’ purpose is to assist workers in making choices that are consistent with the company’s or organisation’s principles. A code of ethics should generally contain the six basic core principles, which states the expectation from the employees to be trustworthy, honest, accountable, reasonable, kind, and decent people. Add that the company values diversity, good practises, and good dress codes as honourable mentions.
In the workplace, a code of ethics will serve to govern ethical action. Workers or groups of employees should turn to the code of ethics if they need to make a decision. New workers are also taught about the company’s principles and standards by the code of ethics. These characteristics stem from the reasons for creating certain codes of ethics or codes of conduct in the first place. Professionals have knowledge and skills that the general public and their employers do not. Professional penalties, membership limits on professional associations, and for certain occupations may find it difficult to teach, and, in the worst-case scenario, regulatory ramifications may be used to enforce codes of ethics.
A code of ethics manual may detail a company’s or organisation’s mission and values, how practitioners should address challenges, ethical guidelines based on the company’s core values, and the requirements to which the practise must adhere. An organisation’s legal rules and best practises regarding fairness, dignity, and discipline are outlined in a code of ethics (McPhail, et al., 2018). Members of an organisation can face penalties, including expulsion, if they violate the code of ethics. Special laws regulate corporate activity in certain fields, such as banking and insurance. In certain cases, a code of ethics can be followed voluntarily. A compliance-based code of ethics, a value-based code of ethics, and a code of ethics for practitioners are the three primary categories of codes of ethics. Companies’ codes of ethics, which outline their contribution to sustainability, have included an emphasis on workplace and the way of working of the employees.
The ethical value sets the guideline for the organisations so that the organisational activities can be governed in the most appropriate manner. It is very crucial for an orgaqnisation to maintain the legal and ethical values because they ensure the relation of employees with people without the discrimination on the basis of sex, environment, and castes. Instead the ethical codes help an organisation to maintain the corporate responsibilities towards the society. Employees and affiliates of both companies and trade unions are expected to follow some form of code of ethics (Edens, et al., 2018). If you violate the code of ethics, you will be fired from the company. A code of ethics is critical because it explicitly outlines the rules of conduct and sets the groundwork for a proactive alert.
Both businesses and labour unions have rules of ethics that their employees and affiliates must follow. Breaking the company’s code of ethics can result in firing or expulsion. A code of ethics is important because it lays the groundwork for constructive alerts by merely laying out the rules of conduct. Financial advisors who are licenced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or a state regulator are bound by a code of ethics known as fiduciary duty. This is both a legal necessity and a code of ethics that allows them to work in their clients’ best interests. Internal ethical dilemmas often should not be straight and simple. It can be complicated, requiring well-defined policies to promote fairness and moral management (Yerby, 2013). In external ties with vendors, consumers, and shareholders, a strong code is the safest way to prevent decisions that can lead, in severe cases, to regulatory interference and prosecution. A consistent declaration of an organisation’s ethics policy often aids employees in aligning their personal beliefs with those of the organisation, resulting in a stronger workplace relationship with both co-workers and executives. In addition, a code of ethics provides individual employees with protection by protecting them from potential ethical violations by unethical organisations. The current debate over transparency and health-care programmes is the result of a number of causes. The first is discontent with the efficiency of the health-care system. This has focused on cost considerations, quality assurance, and access in developing countries.
In each and every healthcare meeting, it’s critical that we retain this degree of confidence in our profession. This entails taking responsibility for our profession, workplace, and patient care. Professional responsibility is described as being “accountable to oneself and others for one’s own conduct,” according to the Code of Ethics. Professionalism in the world of nursing requires much more than just wearing a uniform and behaving professionally (Haber. and Singh, 2014). It consists of a set of standards that are essential for reinforcing the processes, priorities, and decisions that guide nursing practise on a daily basis while also improving patient care.
Social workers are held appropriately liable for their actions, which ensures they must ensure that their behaviour and procedure meet the expectations outlined in this manual and that no intervention or inaction on their part threatens the well-being of service recipients or caregivers. An employee’s position and success expectations must be transparent, and their performance must be reviewed at least once a year using professional and personal improvement assessment programmes. This necessitates the development of a work description as well as KSF measurements and levels for each role (Pozgar, 2019). Practitioners must first examine their own belief structures before they can continue to gain a knowledge and appreciation of ethical problems in relation to the implementation of professional skills. Practitioners who have a greater sense of themselves are better able to appreciate and accept others in both personal and professional situations.
Patients’ personal values affect relationships and choices made by health care practitioners on a regular basis. Before embracing various ethical standards for our clinical practise, we must be mindful of our own personal belief structures. Social concepts serve as benchmarks by which ethical ideas should be judged. These include beneficence, no maleficence, respect, honesty, truthfulness, and equity in health care (Tonry, 2014). There are some legal ideas that are often used in health care. Since technical and legal considerations are often intertwined when it comes to performing healthcare skills, it’s impossible to differentiate them. Professionalism is thought to be essential to a practitioner’s work. Professionalism has traditionally been characterised as specialised fields of human interaction that have culminated in cultures elevating their practitioners. However, as the pace of transition in the legal and technological sectors, as well as in the socioeconomic climate, has increased, which helps to enhance the professional environment. Health practitioners must be mindful of the legislation when it applies to them both professionally and personally. Doctors, nurses, and other health-care practitioners are presumed to be aware of their legal obligations.
In the field of child health care, there are many ethical and legal questions to consider. Not only are ethical dilemmas often intensely emotional, but physicians are frequently asked to determine whether or not an infant is capable. Practitioners are also responsible for the choices they make. The reasons for people’s values formation are various and dynamic. Any of the influences that influence attitudes, ideals, perceptions, and how people react to events, for example, can be influenced by cultural or socio-political viewpoints, religious beliefs, and life experiences (Remley, and Herlihy, 2014).
Values influence our work; they owe people, practitioners, and society life and identity. Patients’ personal values affect relationships and choices made by health care practitioners on a regular basis. Until implementing various ethical standards for clinical practise, it is important to be mindful of one’s own personal value structures. Moral principles influence our judgments, choices, and behaviour. It is possible that our ethical and personal morals are at odds. It is also worth noting that the belief structures of physicians and their patients/clients can be at odds (Upton and Smith, 2020). Ethics knowledge can aid clinicians in resolving future conflicts.
Doctors and other allied health providers have emphasised a scientific approach to treatment, while nurses have emphasised a psychosocial approach to care. The failure to recognise the importance of each of these viewpoints in providing medical care will lead to conflict between various professional classes. Listening to others’ viewpoints is advantageous not only to the patient, but also to our own ethical growth. Paternalism is a term that has been used to make the doctors understand about the decision-making in the past so that the new policies can be formulated accordingly. It will help the doctors to take the appropriate decisions to protect the ethics of the patients. Under the presumption that it was in their best interests and that doctors were in the best position to do so. (Shinde, et al., 2021).
Although this has improved in recent years as patients have become more involved in the decision-making process, there also needs to be a way to accurately measure the level of patient participation in joint decision-making. Knowledge in ethics allows a health care provider to objectively assess their work and to address problem management and decision making in a variety of ways. This is critical in the process of performing a skill, where the first steps are determining whether the skill is appropriate, and whether it can be performed with minimum inconvenience and risk to help the patient.
Accountability is a critical issue with significant consequences for accountants. Any misstatements or cases of deception, for example, are the responsibility and legal liability of an investigator checking a company’s financial statement. Many that perform such tasks are eventually accountable for their performance. The concepts of responsibility, openness, and sovereignty are inextricably linked when determining the scope of nursing and midwifery practise (Davis, 2016). Nurses and midwives are held to a high standard of transparency and must be accountable for their jobs.
The Code of Ethical Conduct and Ethics for Registered Nurses and Registered Midwives has a central precept of responsibility and transparency as a foundation of professional nursing and midwifery practise. Accountability is described as the ability to explain one’s nursing and midwifery decisions, behaviour, and omissions. Maintaining competency and safeguarding quality health care services and professional integrity are both part of being accountable to those who are influenced by one’s nursing or midwifery practise. Accountability entails taking responsibility for decisions taken during one’s clinical practise. A nurse or a midwife should be able to defend the choices they make in their private career, using laws, professional principles and protocols, evidence-based practise, and professional and ethical behaviour as justifications (McPhail, et al., 2018).
Nurses and midwives are morally and professionally responsible for their work, including the choices they make and the outcomes of those decisions. Patients, the media, their administrative agency, their employer, and every applicable supervisory authority hold nurses and midwives accountable. Nurses and midwives are legally liable for ensuring that they have adequate occupational indemnity protection, since patients have a right to trust them to do so in the event of a substantiated accusation of professional malpractice.
Accountability is impossible to obtain until the nurse has completed control in their practise. The freedom of a nurse or midwife to “make certain choices within their own practise, and their right and duty to behave according to the shared values of that profession” is referred to as autonomy. Professional autonomy is described as the capacity to critically apply different types of expertise in order to provide patients with healthy and high-quality health care. Individual degrees of autonomy can differ based on a variety of regulatory, organisational, and personal variables.
Nonmaleficence Framework
Antitrust issues and accountable care organisation
Fidelity
Patient confidentiality
Informed consent
Key legal and ethical issues
A systematic evaluation was conducted for the percentage of chronically ill patients seeking specialist palliative treatment in an emergency hospital environment for more than one day. A holistic review includes physical symptom screening as well as a consideration of the patient’s and family’s psychological and emotional requirements. Within 24 hours of entry (screening day – admission day), all physical screenings must be done. Emotional or psychiatric problems should be discussed at any point during the intake process. Chronic stress and other physical, psychological, and religious causes of suffering are common in patients approaching the end of life, according to research. One of the National Priority Partnership’s national priorities is palliative and end-of-life treatment (Twycross, 2003).
The treatment plan is designed with expert advice and assistance for patient-family decision-making, focusing on the patient’s and family’s’ defined and shared interests, beliefs, priorities, and needs. The patient defines his or her family. Structural issues may be the source of issues identified during the treatment process. The behaviours of healthcare professionals and their relationships with patients and family members are highlighted in the palliative care phase. The amount and accessibility of human and material resources, as well as the existence of consistent practise guidelines, can influence how well patients’ physical, psychosocial, and theological needs are met and valued.
The Central Committee for Hospice and Specialist Palliative Care Services defines psychosocial care as “care dealing with the patient’s psychological and mental well-being, including aspects of self-esteem, insights into an adjustment to the condition and its effects, connectivity, social functioning, and relationships.” It is a type of treatment that allows patients to share their emotions about their illness while also offering means for patients and their families to increase their social and emotional well-being. Since there may be a disagreement among healthcare workers such as physicians, nurses, social workers, and psychiatric counsellors over whose job it is to evaluate the individual with psychological, physical, moral, and social problems (von Blanckenburg and Leppin, 2018). It’s common for cancer patients and their families to deny a diagnosis or wish for a wrong diagnosis. Denial in cancer patients is usually a coping strategy used by the individual, relatives, or both to avoid confronting the severity of the disease.
In certain cases, these will result in problems such as the patient’s inability to speak publicly about the condition, the evasion of cancer terms during conversation, diagnosis delays, care non-compliance, refusal to additional medical attention, or even treatment default. When defined from a psychoanalytic perspective, the word “denial” may refer to an implicit and inadequate defence mechanism against traumatic and daunting facets of truth. It is treated as an adaptive strategy when identified from the cognitive, stress, and coping models. Adaptive and maladaptive denials are the two main types of denial discussed in the literature (Twycross, 2003). Denial of treatment, denial of effect, denial of affect, delusional denial, and mental escape are only a few examples.
It can lead to patients reporting less physical symptoms that are unrelated to their cancer stage or treatment. It can also lead people to expect that a miracle will happen, that the diagnosis is incorrect, and that they may be able to resume things that they have already stopped due to the illness. Clinicians must eradicate lack of knowledge or awareness of the disease diagnosis as a contributory cause when dealing with rejection. Patients’ needs for accessing and interpreting information, as well as different ways of dealing with diagnosis, should be understood by healthcare professionals and caregivers.
However, doctors should stop being too emotionally interested in order to avoid losing control on the severity of the condition or recovery choices as a result of mental self-protection or “clinician denial.” Although pharmacological therapy with anxiolytics and antidepressants may offer symptomatic relief, family support interventions including a social worker might be essential (Beresford, et al., 2007). People who are conscious that their lives have been reduced due to existence imitate face numerous changes and difficulties in their lives. Professionals, families, and community-based care will improve people’s lives by allowing them to stay in their homes and reduce the number of institutional admissions to hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes.
Social support is a valued resource built by an individual’s intimate relationships with everyone else, and it can be formal or informal. It can be composed of both physically and psychologically support.
Palliative care seeks to provide a holistic approach to treating patients with life-limiting conditions, which encompasses their social lives. The social aspects of a person’s life have the power to exacerbate or relieve distress. Social reinforcement has been linked to increased well-being and has been found to increase health conditions in advanced cancer patients. A recent systematic analysis of the efficacy of palliative care programmes that provide social assistance finds that although there are a variety of findings that indicate improved patient well-being, the validity of the research is questionable (Payne, 2006).
Preferences for treatment, communication habits, meanings of pain, and decision-making mechanisms are also examples of cultural sophistication in palliative care. Death is the final trait of all living beings, according to elementary biology. What joins people of all races, regardless of who or when they are born, is that we all die. Regardless of how death is described, each society has its own ideas of how death can occur. For the dead patient, there is a difference between a “acceptable death” and a “healthy death.” A suitable death is defined as one that is non-dramatic, disciplined, and devoid of emotion.
About the fact that all people will eventually die, our perceptions of mortality and how people react to death and dying differ greatly across cultures. When the universe becomes increasingly smaller as a result of the widespread exchange with individuals from various backgrounds, it is essential to comprehend the dynamics that accompany death, much as we do with life. Palliative care is provided in a variety of contexts, including acute hospitals, community-based organisations, and long term care facilities (Chochinov and Breitbart, 2009). Despite evidence that referral to specialised palliative care providers will help certain patients, not all people in their final few months or days of life are referred to them.
When a person’s death is predicted, the family and health care providers will set goals depending on the person’s needs. Medical signs, on the other hand, are not necessarily easy to determine, but they offer the greatest evidence for prognostication. Individuals and families are generally mindful that prognostic guidance based on disease history is speculative, but they do expect that the dialogue and avoidance ‘jeopardises patient- and family-centered outcomes.’ Guidelines for supporting point-of-care decision-making have been established and are now available. Care for someone who is about to die can be difficult, but it is dependent on a careful evaluation of symptoms and preparation for common complications. The scientific base for treating for terminal phase symptoms is lacking, and much of the procedures that have emerged are either observational or inferred from other environments.
References
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