Health - Professional Responsibility Professional

Health - Professional Responsibility PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY and CODES of CONDUCT Professional codes of conduct and ethical standards are a part of most business industries. By the turn of the 21st century, virtually every aspect of professional business and services are subject to various forms of government regulation and many of those that are not are self-regulated by certifying organizations established voluntarily within the industry.

Professional standards and codes of conduct generally address everything from the actual substantive professional responsibilities of practitioners to limitations on other aspects of relationships between professionals and their clients. The nature of each profession dictates the particular focus of its standards of professional conduct and potential conflicts of interest, Similarly, the relative potential for specific types of possible harms associated with each industry provides the bases for various formulations of the regulations governing different professions.

Naturally, medicine is one of the most heavily regulated professional fields, Consequently, the importance of many issues addressed by standards of medical ethics makes the matter of professional responsibility a particularly challenging area for newly graduated medical professionals. Various Types of Professional Standards: Among the most heavily regulated non-medical fields are those involving elements of fiduciary duties, such as accounting, auditing, banking, financial investment, and law.

Those fields maintain extensive codes of ethics that pertain to the responsibility to disclose various potential conflicts of interest and to refrain from simultaneously representing certain types of clients, as well as from many types of billing practices. The practice of law, in particular, maintains an extensive body of professional rules of conduct and professional standards regulated by the American Bar Association (ABA) that restrict even many aspects of ethical duties to past clients and prohibiting representation of certain types of clients simultaneously.

The ABA also outlines professional standards and rules that prohibit lawyers from refusing clients in certain situations. Likewise, positions of public trust such as educators and childcare workers must adhere to professional standards that arise from their unique access to and relationships with vulnerable individuals. Some professional industries involve matters of public safety, such as engineering an architecture, where mistakes, shortcuts, and virtually any degree of deviation from established professional standards could result in grievous harm to members of the public, including death.

Public servants such as judges, public defenders, police officers, and elected members of government must adhere to professional standards detailing their respective obligations to dispense justice and perform other duties associated with their positions in a manner that comports with the standards of professional conduct that are intended to ensure equality, impartiality, and fairness.

Specific Concerns of a New Physician: Some of the principal concerns of standards of professional conduct throughout the medical field relate to complying with safety requirements pertaining to infectious disease control, principles of clinical asepsis, and maintaining patient confidentiality. The evolution of knowledge about the IV virus elevated numerous specific safety concerns in the last two decades of the 20th century; more recently, major changes in federal laws pertaining to the privacy of patient records provided the basis for an entirely new protocol with respect to patient confidentiality.

Likewise, the evolution and contemporary predominance of the third-party-payer system and HMO restrictions and regulations sometimes present various ethical dilemmas for physicians and other medical professionals. The newly graduated physician faces myriad demands that could potentially compromise the quality, safety, or equality of medical services rendered, many of which are addressed by established standards of professional responsibility. In that regard, the new physician must be committed to providing the same quality of patient care after 36 hours on duty as he provides at the start of a tour of duty.

He must follow established rules of clinical asepsis and control of infectious disease religiously, and he must learn the new HIPAA rules and regulations well enough to comply with them and supervise compliance on the part of coworkers under his responsibility. However, nothing in the field of medicine presents more of challenge in the field of professional responsibility than ethical decisions related to the end of human life.

Undoubtedly, the dramatic increase in medical knowledge and the evolution of intervention capabilities have tremendously increased the ability of the newly graduated physician to improve the lives of patients. On the other hand, the availability of modern medical equipment and procedures also present a context for many ethical decisions of the type only relatively rarely faced by physicians of earlier generations.

Contemporary medical science has made the distinction between life and death a matter of subjective choice, particularly in cases where patients and their families must rely on professional advice from physicians on matters involving the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means of prolonging biological life. Such cases may challenge the ability of new physicians to adhere to objective professional medical standards, especially where they conflict with the personal or spiritual beliefs of the physician.

Unlike matters of cleanliness and patient confidentiality that are outlined by very specific rules and definitions, end-of-life decisions and other factors in the choices of treatment of terminally ill patients require the new physician to apply ethical standards that are not readily capable of clinical analysis. In such cases, patients and their families often seek medical advice and recommendations from physicians whose personal beliefs may differ from those of his patients.

In many respects, these situations present the greatest challenge to any physician; for the new physician, the obligation to refrain from violating the fundamental duty to provide only objective information.