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| | Dimensions of ethical reflection,How to analyse dilemmas | | 2005-8-29 13:52:58 Resident in Child and Adolescent Psychia Eline Thorleifsson | The practice of good clinical medicine requires some working knowledge about ethical issues.
The core element of medicine is the encounter between human beings, and the doctor’s work of diagnosing disease, offering advice and providing treatment is embedded in a moral context.
Usually, values such as mutual respect, honesty, compassion and a commitment to pursue shared goals make a clinical encounter between doctor and patient morally unproblematic. Occasionally doctors and patient / next of kin may disagree about values or face choices that challenge their values. It is then that ethical problems arise. Clinical ethics is both about the ethical features that are present in every clinical encounter and about the ethical problems that occasionally arise in these encounters.
Clinical ethics is therefore a sub-discipline of medicine, not of legal or philosophical ethics.
The following practical framework or model for analysing ethical problems could be of help in analysing ethical dilemmas in supervising sessions:
- Identifying the medical problems
- Identifying the involved parties
- Identifying the values and principles
- Discussion of the values at stake
- Possible solutions
A reasonable and practical resolution must be pushed through. Ethical problems, no less than medical problems, cannot be left hanging.
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Ministry of Health, (2003) No.013
ICP:No.040657