Question

Identify legal and ethical health care concepts. Identify the laws and penalties concerning fraud and abuse in healthcare. Illustrate the importance of professionalism in the healthcare industry. Please answer the following questions with supporting examples and full explanations. For each of the learning objectives, provide an analysis of how the course supported each objective. Explain how the material learned in this course, based upon the objectives, will be applicable to the professional application.

Answer 1

1. Explanation of ethical and legal healthcare concepts with examples:

The four important principles of ethics are justice, autonomy, non-maleficence, and beneficence. These principles give healthcare professionals an additional foundation and tools to make ethical decisions whenever they encounter an ethical dilemma.

Autonomy:

• All patients should be respected as individuals

Example: Respecting patient's privacy by maintaining confidentiality.

• Providing information about the patient's treatment and giving an opportunity for the patient to make his/her own decisions about care.

Example: Signing of informed consent.

• Honor the patient's decisions about his/her choice to decline or accept care.

Example: Allowing the patient to leave AMA (against medical advice).

• In addition to having the right to refuse a diagnostic or therapeutic intervention, patients also have the right to refuse to receive information

Example: Not to give any details of a patient's fatal disease if he/she refuses to hear.

Beneficence:

• Advocate and act according to the patient's best interest.

Example: Advising the patient's family to accept what is good for the patient in end-of-life care.

Nonmaleficence:

• Avoid causing any harm to the patient.

Example: Giving an IV faster without giving the required time causing harm to the patient. Such situations should be avoided.

Justice:

• Treat patients fairly and impartially.

Example: Giving unnecessary priority to a particular patient's procedure/treatment should not be done. All should be treated equally and time should be allotted based on time of the visit unless it is an emergency condition.

Legal concepts in healthcare are set forth by government healthcare laws. Legal concepts help healthcare professionals to know what they can’t do. With legal measures in place, authorities are allowed to enforce rules when professionals do something illegal. Legal issues in healthcare are physician-patient relationship, confidentiality, consent, medical records, risk management, end-of-life, communicable disease etc.

Examples of legal issues in healthcare are disgruntled staff, discrimination/harassment cases, immigration audits, copyright and patent Issues, dissatisfied customers, accidents or death from negligence or omission etc.