Health care facilities provide critical services to the society offering medical services to individuals. As usual, a health centre manager and medical practitioners will be faced with many ethical and moral decisions to make during the normal operation of their duties. The ability to develop and maintain high ethical and moral standards to influence the decision making process will proportionately benefit the society.
Medical practitioners at any time should try and ensure high moral and ethical considerations by looking beyond their individual demands. In this case they execute their duties while trying to maximize the benefits of the community. Therefore this paper seeks to illustrate some ethical and moral issues that are encountered in health centers with focus on storage, handling and monitoring of drugs.
Drug storage
Health care managers should ensure the right stock is maintained at any time in the organization. This is to ensure that the health facility does not stock drugs which end up expiring (Sarah 2007). Sarah concludes that effective storage of drugs is critical for any health center. In the modern society, effective storage will call for special equipments like refrigerators which are very costly for the organization. However, with the commercialization of medical services, proper storage of drugs has been compromised as these commercial health centers strive to reduce their cost of operation. They tend to look for cheap ineffective equipment. Improper storage compromises the quality of drugs. This is unethical because the drugs may be harmful to patients (Piers, 2001).
Handling drugs
It is important to note that some type of drugs will require a specialized medic to handle them. The medic will prescribe the use of the drug to the patients. For example Deanna takes home some medicines that she does not have the proper prescription of their use and may risk taking an over dose or under dose. Some health centers do not afford to employ qualified physicians to adequately prescribe the required medication (Piers, 2001).
Any organization operating as a health care should have a qualified physician or pharmacist with the mandate and ability to prescribe medication to patients. The health care’s medical practitioners should ensure proper handling of drugs to ensure that the drugs are free from contamination.
For drugs bought from shops and used with out any prescription of a qualified medical practitioner for instance controlled and generic drugs, their respective manufacturers or governments should try to communicate their prescription through the media regularly.
Monitoring of drugs
Monitoring of drugs ensures stock security of the health cares drugs. Many employees may have a tendency of taking up some drugs for their personal use as in the case of Deanna who has the habit of taking home anti-inflammatory drugs for personal use. This is unethical since drugs are meant for well being of the society and proper procedures are followed before they issued. The organization should operate lockable centers where there must be authorization of drugs is done before issuance (Jordan, 2008).
Computerized drugs monitoring system can help reduce unauthorized issuance of drugs from the health centre. This system will allow data input of the specific drugs purchased by the health centre and on supervision of the manager. On issuance, the system records the medic receiving the issue as well as the quantity and time of issuance (Jordan, 2008).
Conclusion
Health centers play a very big role in our society and therefore managers of such centers direct the organization towards achieving high moral and ethical standards. Medical services should not to be provided for commercial purposes at the expense of the society. Also, the employees of these health facilities should work for the benefit of the society by ensuring high moral standards.
References
Jordan, M. C. (2008), Ethics Manual. New York: American College of Physicians
Publishers.
Piers, T. (2001), Organizational Ethics, In ethics guide. New York: McGraw Hill.
Sarah, J., (2007), medical ethics. In journal of law, medicine and ethics, 27(6):26-27.
