Ethical and Legal Perspectives in Contemporary Healthcare

Ethical and Legal Perspectives in Healthcare
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Ethical and Legal Perspectives in Healthcare
Contemporary healthcare is multifaceted, dynamic, and sophisticated. Healthcare workers, in most cases, may experience challenges when making a decision involving both ethical and legal dilemmas. This paper unravels typical cases entailing ethical, moral, and legal implications to illustrate relevant principles relevant to healthcare.
Case one: Should needlestick protocols determine documentation or contribute to the disclosure of a patient's HIV status?
The increasing reinforcement of privacy and confidentiality raises concerns when testing for HIV. More often, anonymity and nondisclosure policies and practices exist to protect patient's privacy and confidentiality rights while noting the existing stigma associated with HIV. Chaudhuri, Kumbhakar & Morrison (2021) observed that stigma exacerbates ethical challenges that clinicians face, especially in cases involving occupational exposure and HIV testing. This typical case involves a surgeon who attends to unconscious trauma patients of unknown HIV status. While attending to the said patient, the surgeon accidentally sustains a needlestick injury with a contaminated needle. Anonymous HIV testing is done on the patient to minimize occupational exposure, and a request for postexposure prophylaxis is made to reduce the risk of HIV infection in the surgeon. Such anonymous HIV testing is permitted under health guidelines for occupational exposure.
In this case, ethical issues are raised. The HIV results should be excluded from his health records and should remain undisclosed unless otherwise, the patient consents for testing as per the state law. Upon gaining consciousness, the surgeon informs the patient regarding the need to test for HIV, but the patient dismisses the surgeon's requests, saying that he does not have AIDS. But the surgeon considers it a disservice not to reveal HIV status nor to go for HIV testing. The surgeon's actions, in this case, are ethical because they are aligned to ethical principles of autonomy, nonmaleficence, and beneficence. Autonomy reflects the state of self-governance and leading according to personal beliefs, reasons, values, principles, or desires. The surgeon respected the patient's autonomy by prioritizing the patient's decision in going for HIV testing for any formal disclosure. The surgeon's action and advice directly relied on the patient's beliefs, which demonstrate a broader sense of the patient's autonomy. Nonmaleficence is one of the ethical principles that represent actions that bear no harm or inflict minimal harm. In this case, there are no obvious actions from the surgeon that could potentially cause harm to the patient. According to Chaudhuri, Kumbhakar & Morrison (2021), the clinical bioethical framework affirms that principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence inspired the surgeon's actions. However, the harms of knowing one's HIV diagnosis may be balanced against potential harms to oneself and the public not being aware of one's status (Brisson, 2018).
The surgeon's advice for the patient to consider testing was quite prudent because it could help the patient get ...