Download Medical ethics final paper (deontology) and more Papers Medical ethics in PDF only on Docsity!
Name Professor Medical Ethics (Course Code) Date
A deontological approach to medical malpractice that harms
patients
The question that I discuss in this paper is the question of what to do when you see a colleague commit malpractice and harm a patient. For example, imagine that you are working as a resident in a surgery. There is a routine surgery that is being performed and your attending doctor is teaching you how to perform the surgery. Accidentally they cut the wrong organ out of the patient and the patient is placed in a position where they are caused irreparable harm due to the actions of the attending doctor. What is the medically ethical next action? This question should be answered using deontology because it provides more of a direct answer whereas other ethical frameworks make it much harder to get to an answer. Deontology is an ethical framework that follows moral laws or norms that are put into place by society and based on if those moral laws are followed determines whether the action is moral or not. Since deontology bases its decisions off of a set of rules, it is important to know what the rules are for malpractice and what malpractice is. The definition of malpractice is defined as any act or omission by a physician during the treatment of a patient that deviates from accepted norms of practice in the medical community and causes an injury to the patient. This means that if a wrong action is taken by a doctor and if it harms the patient, the doctor has committed malpractice. For example, the rules for reporting malpractice in Illinois are that if you see something as a doctor, you must report it to the hospital and the medical board. Deontology
would say that these rules are the standard to be followed in order to gauge if the decision is ethical or not. My stance on how to report malpractice is that we should look at the case at hand and follow deontology to make a final decision. The first fact based off of the given information is that there was a routine procedure that was being performed. The second piece of given information was that you as the resident were viewing what your attending doctor was doing. The third and last piece of information is that you as the resident, clearly see that your attending has made a mistake and cut out the wrong organ out of the patient and you know that this will undoubtedly harm the patient. Since I am viewing this problem through the stance of deontology, It is important for me to restate the definition of malpractice so that they are clear for us to compare the situation. The definition says that if there is a routine procedure happening and an unwarranted action that causes any kind of harm to the patient is performed, the doctor who performed the aforementioned unwarranted action has participated in malpractice. In this case, the doctor has clearly steered away from the normal actions of the procedure. It is not a normal step of any procedure to cut out a wrong part of the patient. Secondly, the attending doctor has caused irreparable harm to the patient. This is the second criterion that was met for medical malpractice. The rules for reporting malpractice as a doctor in Illinois are that you must go to the head of the hospital and then you must report the malpractice to the medical board. However in the United States, the law for reporting malpractice states that; “The allegation of medical negligence must be filed in a timely manner; this legally prescribed period is called the “statute of limitation” and varies from state to state. Once the injured person has established that negligence led to injury, the court calculates the monetary damages that will be paid in compensation”(Ball, 1). Using
using utilitarianism, you would have a very difficult time deciding. Do you want to make the patient who was harmed happy, or do you want to make the doctor who has just caused a patient irreparable harm to the patient happy, you would have to choose whose pleasure to value more over whose pain to value more. In this case, you would have to make a morally difficult choice and you would be open to attack by many different people with many varying viewpoints. Not to mention people who would use a different ethical framework than you. However, with deontology, you have a clear answer. While using deontology you would have strong fundamentals to defend your case on. For example, you could use the idea of autonomy and say that the doctor violated the patients' autonomy, or as Dr. Thana de Campos, a professor at Oxford explains, you can use the principle of justice. She explains that by viewing a medical ethics issue through a deontological view and zooming into the principle of justice, one will get a much clearer answer to the problem. If the doctor has harmed the patient, what should be done for the patient to receive justice? The answer to this is of course to report the doctor. This answer would be very difficult to dispute due to the fact that you are following the rules that are set in place. Even if someone was using a different ethical framework, there is not much that they could dispute if all of the rules had been followed. Therefore many more people would understand your decision as opposed to someone making a decision by choosing which party to appease.
Works Cited
Bal, B Sonny. “An Introduction to Medical Malpractice in the United States.” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research , U.S. National Library of Medicine, Feb. 2009, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2628513/. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023. “Illinois State Medical Negligence Laws You Must Know | Casetext.” Casetext.com ,casetext.com/analysis/illinois-state-medical-negligence-laws-you-must- now. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023. Ankin, Howard. How to Report Medical Malpractice in Illinois | Ankin Law. 31 Oct. 2023, ankinlaw.com/how-to-report-medical-malpractice-in-illinois/. Accessed 6 Dec.
“Utilitarianism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utilitarianism. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023. Campos, Thana C de. “Justice and Responsibility.” Philosophical Foundations of Medical Law , 21 Nov. 2019, pp. 88–106, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796558.003.0006. Accessed 12 Dec. 2023.
