While practicing medicine, healthcare practitioners must adhere to four ethical health principles. These principles are the backbone of medical practice. They are intended to act as guidelines to help workers make decisions under challenging circumstances (Casali & Perano, 2021). The four critical components of health ethics are autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.
E.L. Straight is the Director of Clinical Services at Hopewell Hospital in Virginia. During his two-year tenure in that position, he is faced with the challenge of having to cut down on the privileges of a colleague that may damage his reputation as a superb surgeon, but he had aged as a consequence of his physical and mental degeneration. One day, the supervisor of the operating room paid him a visit in his office, generating complications for an adult surgeon in the operating room. He was concerned that the plastic needle shield might get lodged in a patient’s stomach. After then, the patient was discharged from the hospital. A week after surgery, they discovered abnormalities in the records indicating that a syringe that shouldn’t have been there had been left in the operating room. After being questioned, the nurse acknowledged to using a syringe but failing to remove the protective shell while doing the final post-procedure count.
Straight requests that the patient be taken to the operating room so that he can locate the sheath, but he is told that he is at home and that the surgeon, Dr. Cutrite, refuses to return her to the hospital. He concludes that there will be no harm done in any way. Straight dialed the chief of surgery’s number and posed a hypothetical query concerning the ramifications of leaving a hat on someone. Although it may be painful, the head of surgery feels it will do no harm; nonetheless, no one knows what the long-term implications will be. Straight is at a loss for what to do since Dr. Cutrite has considerable authority at the hospital as a result of his long service there and Straight is at a loss for what to do (InDarr, et al., 2017).
Dr. Cutrite’s decision not to take action on the needle cap, despite the fact that he was a politically powerful man in the hospital, was the single most important aspect of this case that aided E.L. Straight’s ethical quandary. When E.L. Straight first met this situation, he requested that the patient be returned to surgery to remove the cap. This quick choice is motivated by the ethical concept of non-maleficence, which states that the provider should not harm the patient. The patient, however, has been discharged, and Dr. Cutrite’s desires have been denied. The ethical concept of justice manifests itself in the contexts in which it finds itself.
In the ethical decision-making paradigm, the components of moral awareness, moral judgment, and ethical behavior work together to form a whole (Opsahl et al., 2020). Each of these elements may assist in comprehending the ethical problem presented by this circumstance. When confronted with an ethical dilemma, moral awareness is the recognition of the occasion, and moral judgment is the choice between right and wrong behavior (Opsahl et al., 2020). Ethical behavior is described as an act of doing what is right and expected to solve an ethical dilemma as a result of a combination of moral awareness and moral judgment (Guidolin et al., 2021). E.L Straight’s moral conscience may be shown in his concern and belief that leaving a cap in one’s stomach after surgery might be harmful. This was his first moral judgment, and he used it to send the patient back to the operating room in search of the lid. On the other hand, moral behavior has yet to emerge since it is torn between going against the revered surgeon’s intentions, implementing them, or being immoral despite one’s wants at the moral assessment stage of the decision-making process.
Being aware that it may cause harm to the patient EL Straight must depend on the four core principles of health ethics (autonomy, compassion, innocence, and justice) to guide and enhance his moral judgment in order to make ethical choices or act ethically. He must also be mindful that the satisfaction of his managers will have an impact on the ethical components of his choices. Limited Consciousness allows us to ignore essential facts when defining a problem, therefore restricting the in-depth study of the ethical implications of an issue (Guidolin et al., 2021)
For resolving this ethical dilemma, verbal communication is likely to
Order this paper