Ethical Problems Related to Patient and Prescription Drug Use

Daily, healthcare workers face a variety of ethical dilemmas. An ethical problem arises when a decision, activity, or scenario conflicts with society’s moral principles. Medical ethics knowledge and practice are essential in the daily activities of healthcare professionals, as a lack of adequate knowledge and application may result in legal suits against them (AbuAbah et al., 2019). Managing ethical issues can present difficulties in various areas, including patient confidentiality, communication, professional duties and conduct, and decision-making. To address the ethical problems in their practice, healthcare providers use resolution, consultation, stalling, and disclosure or concealment techniques. The goal of this paper is to describe an ethical issue concerning poor patients and the use of prescription drugs.

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A patient who arrives in the operating room (OR) due to a medical emergency but lacks health insurance, is between jobs, and thus lacks the funds to cover the bill and purchase post-operative prescription medications presents an ethical quandary to the physician and other healthcare providers. As much as the physicians must perform their duties and save the patient’s life, it is critical to ensure that the patient can purchase post-operative medications, as failure to do so may result in post-operative infections, which can lead to sepsis and complicate the patient’s condition.

As a result, while the physician may perform their duty of saving the patient’s life, this decision may be fatal in the long run because the patient’s failure to purchase post-operative prescription medications may result in potential suffering later, an outcome that may conflict with the ethical principle of nonmaleficence, which requires the physician to cause no harm to the patient (Varkey, 2021). To address this issue, healthcare providers must look into other, less expensive medications that may serve the same purpose but at a lower cost.

Healthcare providers must be able to make a living from their profession. Patients have the right to proper healthcare and treatment, but they should also be able to pay for the services provided in healthcare facilities. They should also be able to follow discharge instructions, including taking prescribed medications, to ensure favorable and improved post-operative health outcomes.

For example, a patient in need of a kidney transplant who is on the same waitlist as two other patients but is in a more critical condition may receive the transplant before the other two. If this patient cannot pay for the services provided, the doctors will have done the moral thing by offering him the transplant. However, this decision will deprive the healthcare facility of much-needed revenue to help it run its operations. A possible solution to this problem would be for the hospital to work with the patient and their family to devise a plan for the gradual payment of the bill until it is fully cleared. Community support may also be considered, with a fund drive set up to help offset the hospital bill. The fund drive, however, may not raise enough money to cover the bill.

Care-based ethics approaches morality and decision-making through a relational and context-bound lens. It involves both a caregiver and the person receiving care. In this approach, the caregiver provides care in response to the person receiving care’s perceived need for maintenance. It considers the patient’s well-being despite other factors in the situation. Healthcare providers act by providing a transplant to the patient despite the patient’s inability to pay for the services and, in response to a perceived need for the kidney, giving the transplant to the more needy patient than the other two patients. As a result, they employ care-based ethics in this situation.

People have inalienable rights, according to rights-based ethics. According to this viewpoint, ethical behavior must be capable of upholding people’s rights, and these rights cannot be revoked. As a result, the right to healthcare is universal to all individuals, and all three individuals in the preceding scenario have the right to proper healthcare (Rachels & Rachels, 2019). In this scenario, a rights-based approach would have awarded the kidney transplant to the first person on the wait list rather than the person in greatest need of the kidney transplant.

The use of healthcare technology, such as the hospital’s electronic health records, can be critical in tracking the progress of a patient unable to pay for offered healthcare services and prescription medications. The moral compass that can be applied to this technology is preserving the patient’s privacy. Unauthorized personnel should not have access to the patient’s health records. A practical viewpoint, which holds that the outcomes of the actions determine the rights or wrongs of steps, can be applied in this case. If electronic health records allow for good patient tracking products, but a privacy breach occurs, the action is not considered ethical.

According to Kantian theory, an action is considered right or wrong based on whether the person making the decision fulfills their duty rather than the consequences of the activities. Therefore, A Kantian would work with a decision that benefits the institution, regardless of whether the decision harms the patient. For example, using social media such as blogs and crowdfunding to raise funds for a patient who cannot pay for their healthcare may be considered ethical as long as it provides the necessary funds to the healthcare institution, even if the patient’s privacy is violated.

According to ethical egoism theory, moral decision-making should be guided by self-interest. The approach provides no resolution or common-sense compromise to an ethical quandary. It simply allows both parties to pursue their desires. The basic idea behind ethical egoism is that promoting one’s interests is moral. Morality is thus judged to exist only when one promotes one’s interests (Kao, 2019). In the above scenario, physicians will act morally only if they ensure that the patient pays for the services they provide so that they can be compensated for their time.

According to the social contract theory, people live together in society based on an agreement establishing the fundamental moral and political rules of behavior. This allows people to live morally according to their preferences without interference. When crowdfunding is used to settle a patient’s hospital bill, the social contract theory applies because people believe it is morally correct to band together. Pool resources to help the patient pay their hospital bill.

In conclusion, morality and ethics guide in determining what is considered right or wrong and aid in developing a person’s character, reasonable behavior, choices, and the justification of decisions, goals, and actions in life. These moral principles also guide work ethics and may offer guidance in dealing with ethical quandaries in the healthcare sector.

References

AbuAbah, F., Alwan, A., Al-Jahdali, Y., Al Shaikh, A., Alharbi, A., & Al-Jahdali, H. (2019). Common medical ethical issues faced by healthcare professionals in KSA. Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences, 14(5), 412–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtumed.2019.09.001

Kao, Y. Y. S. (2019). What’s in it for Me? On Egoism and Social Contract Theory. Introduction to philosophy: Ethics.

Rachels, S., & Rachels, J. (2019). The elements of moral philosophy (9th ed.). Mcgraw-Hill Education.- (textbook chapter 11)

Varkey, B. (2021). Principles of clinical ethics and their application to practice. Medical Principles and Practice, 30(1), 17–28.

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Question

Instructions

Develop, in detail, a situation in which a healthcare worker might be confronted with ethical problems related to patients and prescription drug use OR patients in a state of poverty.

Ethical Problems Related to Patient and Prescription Drug Use

Your scenario must be original to you and this assignment. It cannot be from the discussion boards in this class or any other previous forum.
Articulate (and then assess) the ethical solutions that can be found using “care” (care-based ethics) and “rights” ethics to those problems.
Assessment must ask if the solutions are flawed, practicable, persuasive, etc.
What healthcare technology is involved in the situation? What moral guidelines should be used for using that kind of healthcare technology? Explore such approaches using utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, ethical egoism, or social contract ethics.
Say how social technologies such as blogs, crowdfunding, and online encyclopedias can be used in either case. What moral guidelines should be used for using that kind of healthcare technology? Develop such policies using utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, ethical egoism, or social contract ethics.

It would be best not to use any text you used in a discussion board or assignment for this or any previous class.

Cite the textbook and incorporate outside sources, including citations.

Requirements

Length: 3-4 pages (not including title page or references page)
1-inch margins
Double spaced
12-point Times New Roman font
Title page
References page (minimum of 2 scholarly sources)

Grading

This activity will be graded based on the Assignment Grading Rubric.

Outcomes

CO 7: Assess the moral solutions arrived at through “care” (care-based ethics) and “rights” ethics to social issues of ethical import, such as poverty, drug use, lack of health care, and similar matters.

CO 8: Develop moral guidelines for using critical recent and emerging healthcare and social technologies based on moral theories such as utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, care-based ethics, ethical egoism, social contract theory, etc.

Ethical Problems Related to Patient and Prescription Drug Use