Pozgar - Legal and ethical issues for health professionals

THIRD EDITION

George D. Pozgar, MBA, CHE

Consultant

GP Health Care Consulting

Annapolis, Maryland

Legal Review

Nina Santucci, JD

Medical Review

John W. Pinnella, MD, DDS, FICS

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Copyright 2013 by Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC, an Ascend Learning Company

All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or utilized in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

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Publisher: Bill Brottmiller

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Printing and Binding: Malloy, Inc.

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To order this product, use ISBN: 978-1-4496-7211-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pozgar, George D.

Legal and ethical issues for health professionals / George D. Pozgar. 3rd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4496-4775-9

I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. EthicsUnited States. 2. Legislation, MedicalUnited States. 3. Ethics, ClinicalUnited States. 4. Patient RightsUnited States. W 32.5 AA1]

KF3821.P68 2010

174.2dc23

2011051293

6048

Printed in the United States of America

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What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Henry S. Haskins

Health care is personal. It is perhaps the most personal of any service any of us will receive in our lifetime. We all need it and recognize its importance. And we need to know that our health care delivery system has ethical and legal integrity as well as scientific validity. Sometimes correct choices are not always obvious. There are gray areas. That is why health care administrators and providers need a resource such as this book to help clarify their responsibilities and to help guide them through the tough choices that inevitably occur. Intuition and good intentions are laudable but are not enough when it comes to health care. There are specific criteria that our society requires in this very sensitive area. Awareness of those criteria is crucial. That information, however, comes from a variety of sources that are not always readily accessible. This book concentrates much of that information into one convenient volume. It provides the reader with the proper foundation to make good decisions in the delivery of patient care. That is the ultimate goal of this book.

John W. Pinnella, MD, DDS, FICS

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

Legal and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals, Third Edition provides the reader with a clear understanding of the law and ethics as they relate to health care dilemmas. The practical application of ethics in the health care setting is accomplished by interspersing the thoughts of great minds through Quotes, events in the world through Newspaper Clippings, provider and organizational experiences through Reality Checks, patient experiences through People Stories, and legal rulings and summaries through Cases. The book ends with a closet drama that illustrates the real world of human behavior and ties together the elements of the book in one case.

The reader is presented in the Third Edition with real-world life experiences that bring the reader through a journey of learning that provides an effective transitional stage from the classroom to the reality of the everyday work environment.

This book is a comprehensive reference dealing with the questions of right and wrong. The reader will learn how to evaluate and distinguish between the rightness and wrongness of alternative courses of action when faced with complicated ethical problems. Ethics in the health care setting are about doing the right thing for both patients and caregivers. It involves recognizing ethical dilemmas and effectively addressing them. This book provides the reader with:

Basic principles of ethics and the law in an easily understood format.

Insight into how ethics and the law are intertwined.

Features such as Newspaper Clippings, Reality Checks, People Stories, and Cases to illustrate real-life issues.

The tools to help guide the reader to additional resources in the study of ethics and the law.

An understanding of how ethics and the law assist the reader in resolving ethical conflicts and dilemmas.

A better understanding of the application of ethical principles and values in the health care setting.

A clearer understanding of the rights of patients and caregivers.

When people consider matters of ethics they are usually considering matters of freedom in regard to personal choices, ones obligations to other sentient beings, or judgments about human character and the right to choose.

This book, as with the first and second editions, starts with the premise that to act in an ethical manner means to engage in conduct according to accepted principles of right and wrong. The authors objective is to provide the reader with the background knowledge necessary to understand that ethical behavior begins with understanding that we have alternatives and choices in our behavior regarding how we treat ourselves and how we treat others. To make good decisions, we must first understand that they will be only as good as our knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. Thus, it is important to study ethics and apply the principles learned when addressing common health care dilemmas.

This book is not an indictment of any profession or organization. It does, however, illustrate how a minority of people can often cast a dark shadow on all the good that occurs by so many for so many. It is about learning how the system can break down and how we can so easily fix it simply by good people doing good things. The book is a call to arms to do good things, to stand out from the crowd, because acts of caring, compassion, and kindness often go unnoticed