Ethics Week 5

Wow already on week 5... We are moving right along. Usually I write about the Track's We Leave book. This is because I always find the stories interesting and relatable, as well as something I can learn from. This week the reading was about graduate medical education. The chapter was full of information and very educational but didn't leave me with much to reflect on. This week I therefore will concentrate on the Manging Ethically readings. This should also help me think of a topic for my second mini-paper.

The first reading really stood out to me, it stated that clinical activity of health care executives should be limited to recruitment and retention of the best qualified staff and to then be responsive to legitimate requests for essential resources. The author then states that the executive have a moral obligation to ensure that patients receive the highest possible quality care. I completely agree with this. I think that in order to understand who is the best staff for your organization, you need to know who your patients are, what their expectations are and then monitor that your staff is meeting desired expectation. The author suggests making frequent patient rounds so that the opportunity for communicating with patients, physicians and nurses will arise. This could be very difficult for an executive to efficiently achieve. Any health care facility is very busy and the executive would not want to interfere with the activities already in process. However if the executive is knowledgeable about the way the organization is run, then they may be able to proper identify a reasonable time to effectively interact with those in the organization. This could be during the patient wait time before a procedure or their wait time associated with discharge. I also like the suggestion that the executive interact with the ethics committee on a daily basis. By doing this the executive will be able to easily identify any issues going on within the organizations that may need to be more closing monitored. This would have give the executive expert insight on the ways he can ethically deal with any situations he may have observed.
The next reading was about end of life decisions. This reading was interesting to me because it is similar to the topic in which my team will be debating, futile treatments. The author states that the decision to withhold or discontinue extraordinary or disproportionate means of medical intervention must be made with the judgment that the treatment itself is excessively burdensome or that the treatment is useless(not whether a persons life is not worth living). The topic for my debate is whether health care organizations should be able to refuse demands for futile treatments. I believe yes that health care organizations, maybe a specific panel designed for these types of situations, should be able to make the decision. Patients and their families may not be rationale in there thinking during these types of situations. Health care organization have the education to make informed decisions on whether a treatment is necessary, and with the help of an ethics committe they can determine if that decsion is also moral.