Patient Advocacy. Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay.

Patient Advocacy
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Abstract
Today, the patients are the main stakeholders in their treatment and rehabilitation plans. Moreover, the patients have earned their rights of making decisions regarding their treatment plans. The patient dependent treatments plans are achieved as a result of extensive legislative developments. In this report, some of the historical milestones in this domain are briefly discussed.
Patient Advocacy
1. The significance of autonomy, patient advocacy, and informed consent
1.1 Autonomy:
Autonomy can be defined as the capacity of a person to make his or her own decisions. In the health sciences, it is regarded as the ability of the patient to make decisions regarding his/her own treatment. The highlighted feature of patient autonomy is the consent or agreement between the patient and the healthcare physicians regarding the disease management or treatment (Ballou, 1998) .However, this principle is widely debated, when the patient is not able to make reliable decisions about their treatment. For instance, a patient in coma or suffering from a depressive episode is not able to make a reliable and life-sustaining decision about the treatment.
1.2 Patient Advocacy:
Advocacy is generally described as to safeguard the rights and property of others. The patient advocate may be a person or an organization, often, about one specific group of disorders (Sage, 1998). The patient advocacy is a broad field and some the patient advocates are affiliated to some organization and representing the patients covered by their firms. The patient advocacy is, there, a representation of the patient’s rights, defense of the patient’s rights, and empowerment of patients involved in the treatment procedures.
1.3 Informed Consent:
Informed consent is the evaluation of the patient’s information, understanding, and permission to carry out a certain treatment or diagnostic procedure. The patient, as a result of informed consent, is able to understand the clinical causes and implications of the disease, the operating procedure of the medical practice, and finally understand the risks and benefits associated with certain treatment or diagnostic procedure. The documentation requires the signature of the patient or the patient’s advocate on the treatment statement stating that the patient understands the risk and benefits associated with the procedure and the institute has the right to carry out their treatment or other clinical procedures. (Janofsky, 1992).
1.4 The Nuremberg Code (1947):
The Nuremberg Code, designed in the year 1947, is considered one of the most important documents in the history of medical ethics. Unfortunately, the document was one too late for the victims who suffered in the hands of Nazi doctors performing inhumane experiments on subjects in the concentration camps and a general population level. (Shuster, 1998)
The summary of the main points of the Nuremberg code is as follow:
• The patient is well informed of the medical experiments and its implications and willing to participate in it
• The clinical trial or experiment is designed to safeguard the health of the involved individuals and society
• The ex...