LAW AND ETHICS IN NURSING PRACTICES NUR 304
A Case Study
Healthcare and medicine has come a long way to what it is right now. In fact, the history of healthcare can be said to be as old as human civilisation. From the first hunter-gatherers who used herbs for medicine through the era of witch trials and questionable doctors of the old to modern medical practitioners, humanity has always looked for ways to deal with the various ailments that plague them. Since for most of history the practice of medicine was non-standardised and mostly operated on trial and error basis, ethical and legal issues were not of much concern in the practice. This was compounded by the fact that many of the treatments of the time were ineffective. Due to these reasons, people were more concerned with finding the treatment that at least worked than with the ethicality of the medical practice and the practitioner. However, with time technological inventions, discoveries and improvements of the modern world have made health care to be safer and more standardised. With treatments becoming more effective and technological innovation enabling for complicated medical operations and things like genetic engineering, there was a need to create ethical and legal guidelines to regulate the healthcare industry and inform the decisions to be taken by the various medical practitioners. This has led to the formulation of laws and ethical principles for medical practitioners worldwide. While some of the laws and guidelines are made through legislation by government, others are made by the professional bodies for healthcare workers while others are as a result of court rulings. This essay is going to present two case studies that demonstrate the use of law and ethics in healthcare. The case studies will be the basis for the main debate on law and ethics. The names of the subjects and other identifying details have been withheld in the essay in order to ensure confidentiality of the information as per the regulations (NMC, 2015, 08).
Patient’s Case
The patient is 10-year-old female child that was taken to hospital for a simple operation to clear up a painful swelling on the left side of her hip. The swelling and pain were chronic, and she had received some treatment for it in the past. On reaching the hospital, she was scheduled to be operated on by the doctor. Unbeknownst to her, the doctor had on a number of previous different occasions been summoned and warned by the management regarding his habit of “forgetting” to inform the patients of all the possible risks of the operations that he carried out plus other infractions. However, he had not been fired as there was an acute shortage of surgeons with his particular skill set at the time and his mistakes were viewed as being minor. Before the doctor conducts the surgery, he asks a few questions about her previous hospital visits for the condition in order to get an estimate of her medical history. He avoids looking at her hospital files himself as it is quite extensive, and he has other surgeries to attend. The doctor then decides to go ahead and conduct the surgery and then discharges her. A few days after the surgery, she begins to feel a persistent numbness in her left leg that only gets worse with time. By the end of the week, her left leg is completely paralysed. She decides to go to a different hospital to be checked and tells the doctor of the operation she underwent to ease the swelling and pain. On examining her file, the doctor discovers that the patient has a rare condition that makes an operation of that nature too dangerous for her. In addition to that, the operation carried a 3 – 4 percent risk of paralysis but she was not told of as the doctor assumed that the risk was too small to bother telling her about it. As the doctor did not read her file, he also did not know of patient’s special condition; had he known he would not have gone ahead with the operation. The patient’s family decides to sue the doctor and the hospital that employed him for negligence and withholding vital information from her.
The Important Issues at Hand from the Case
The first step is to determine the ethical and or legal issues of the case. The main ethical issue is whether it was right for the doctor and the team that took part in the surgery to withhold information from her regarding the possible risks of the operation. This is especially so since she ended up being paralysed from it and paralysis was a risk.
Apart from that, the hospital administration kept the doctor on the job despite the fact that he had a history of previous disciplinary mistakes, which may amount to negligence. The rationale for retaining him is put in question, as it would only be a matter of time before such an incidence occurred.
In addition, there