There are many gray areas when it comes to ethical and legal guidelines in the healthcare industry. This is because healthcare providers are supposed to care for all of the people that they are providing healthcare for. Therefore, the healthcare provider is going to have his or her beliefs on what they believe is ethical or not. Sometimes this could interfere with the standards of the law for their practice. On the contrary, a healthcare provider can only do what the patient asks them to do based on personal beliefs of the patients and their ethical issues. When a medical professional is put into a particular situation when a hard decision needs to be made, there are laws and guidelines that are set in place to help the healthcare providers to make the right decision.
All of these laws and guidelines can affect the way that a health provider is going to be able to perform their duties. It is up to healthcare provider to ask themselves if what they are going to help their patient is ethical or legal. Therefore, a healthcare provider’s emotions can play a big part of their decisions (Fremgen, 2012). Even if a healthcare provider feels like certain treatment needs to be done in order to give their patient proper care, the patient might not agree with this treatment plan because of their beliefs. A healthcare provider cannot harm or cause any pain to their patients, but there are some procedures that are going to help the patient that might cause pain to the patient.
Since some people have a hard time taking responsibility for their own actions, people usually will blame other people on why certain things happened to them along with making up excuses. Therefore, the healthcare provider has the responsibility to make sure that all of their patients are getting the proper care that they need. But it is also responsibility of the patient to listen to all of the information that the healthcare provider is telling them so that they are able to make a full recovery. This could also help to ensure that the patient’s condition is not going to get worse. If the patient is not given the correct care or information for their condition, then the healthcare provider will need to take the responsibility that they did not do their job correctly but the patient also has some responsibility if they did not do what the healthcare provider told them to do.
References:
Fremgen, Bonnie F. (2012). Medical Law and Ethics. (4th Edition). Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.
