Some Basic Ethics for Healthcare Professionals
Ethics are not optional in medicine: they are an essential and integral part of health care. A common ethical code for everybody involved in health care is potentially valuable and is to be welcomed, but the role and limitations of such a code need to be recognized. Medical ethic is the duty of the physician towards the patient a necessity to practice medicine. Since public health professionals often have to face difficult ethical decisions, public health institutions are more and more interested in integration of ethics in their curricula. Here are is a list of some basic ethics that every health worker must adhere to. Do no harm: A health care professional should act in such a way that he or she does no harm, even if her or his patient or client requests this. For example, banning smoking in public places may cause harm to individual smokers but will prevent greater harms through acting as a general disincentive to smoking among the wider population. Health maximization: P...