Question

What are some unethical practices that can arise in healthcare? How can the Human Resources function assist in managing these types of issues? As a department manager, how can you assist in managing these types of issues?

Answer 1

Unethical Practices in Healthcare

Due to demand of high level of ethical behavior and set of rules and regulations to be followed in the healthcare industry is very important in order to stay in the safe zone. But still many of the professions come up with the specific kind of situations in which they get engage in such unethical practices which needs to be identified and resolved as soon as possible to maintain the ethical environment in the healthcare facility.

Now let us discuss about some unethical practices that can arise in healthcare and how human resource function assist in managing these types of practices and also how we as a department manager can assist such practices.

•  Sharing patient’s details to any other person is an unethical practice as this may lead to hurting the patient’s sentiments and breaking the law of patient confidentiality. The human resource management take`s higher level of awareness among the staff members and medical practitioners by adding this rule in code of conduct of the medical facility to ensure that if any such unethical practices happens it may be considered as breaking the code of conduct of the facility and strict action must be taken. As a department manager it is very important for us to make sure this practice does not happens and to avoid such practices we should make sure that the staff members and medical practitioners assigned are always briefed to ensure that such practices and avoided.

•  Malpractice and Negligence are the most common aspect of an unethical practice in the healthcare industry and human resource management takes strict action like firing the staff member or medical practitioner and taking legal action against the person. As a department manager we should be always conducting refresher training among the staff members and medical practitioner to ensure that every treatment procedure is done appropriately without any error.

•  Informing the patient about the treatment is very important as both in ethical and legal manner, In other words the patient must be informed about the treatment which they are going to provide to the patient in order to inform about the consequences of the treatment that can happen to the patient if something does not happen as per planned. Human resource management always force the medical practitioner to inform the patient about the medical consequences by the asking them to sign the consent form before availing such medical treatment that can result in injury or death. As a department manager we should always be tracking about such cases and keep in touch with both the parties medical practitioner and the patient in order to make sure both the parties knows about the consequences and possibility of the treatment.