Ethical and Legal Responsibilities

Getting ready for class I have learned a lot about ethics committees. One of the websites that we had to read through for class talked about ethics committees. I didn't realize that there was such a thing, I guess I never really thought about it, because as soon as I thought about ethics committees it made complete sense to me to have such things in hospitals, etc. Ethics committees can be very helpful in different situations.

The underlying goals of ethics committees are:

• to promote the rights of patients;
• to promote shared decision making between patients (or their surrogates if decisionally incapacitated) and their clinicians;
• to promote fair policies and procedures that maximize the likelihood of achieving good, patient-centered outcomes; and
• to enhance the ethical tenor of health care professionals and health care institutions. (http://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/ethics.html)

In the discussion for "My Sister's Keeper" I talked about the importance of being a patient advocate. That seems to be what the ethics committee is. The are leaders that advocate for the patients best interest.

After Class:

I liked what we discussed in class. We talked about how ethical issues are different to different people because everybody has a different point of view on things. Ethics have to due with your personal values, and sometimes your personal values can put you into a sticky position.

One of the questions that was brought up in class was: How do we take our personal values and bring them into the job?

It made me think that there would be some things that I would not wish to participate in, such as abortions. (Hopefully I wouldn't get a job that I ever have to deal with that.) And there are some things that I will have to leave up for the patient and act as the patient advocate whether I agree with them or not. Sometimes, I will have to make sure that the patient has the knowledge that they need to make an educated decision and that will be all that I can do.Other times I may need to get involved with an ethics committee and see what happens with that.