Current healthcare system pays much attention to ethics in healthcare, especially to the issue of healthcare staff and patient responsibilities. During practice, various issues, demanding legal or ethical opinion, arise, and thus, healthcare facilities have to have either in-house or on-call legal counselors, or ethicists that assist healthcare practitioners and patients in difficult situations. Some hospitals established ethics committees to facilitate provision of consultations and reviews.
Ethics is often referred to as the point of beginning where the law ends, though “ethics should be seen not so much as simply beginning where the law ends but as a practice that both influences and is influenced by the law” (Crane, 2016, p. 538). Reviewing legislation and ethics as legal and moral basis for improvement and development of healthcare standards, based on mutual responsibilities, people should regard morality and ethics as a herald of development of regulations and laws, intended for social order. Both laws and ethics have the same goal of bringing social good.
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Law and ethics are interconnected, thus, ethical norms can derive from policies, practices, standards, obligations and laws. Nevertheless, laws derivate from constitutions, statutes, regulations, case laws, and ordinances, if applicable, but not from the ethical norms. In other words, ethics explains about values and how things ought to be, while laws express values through social rules, and demonstrate how things have to be.
Patients’ responsibilities is one of the example, how ethics and law can be interconnected. For instance, patient gives his consent (legal issue) for treatment, accepting the recommended treatment plan (responsibility issue), and if he stops or discontinues his treatment, he would be held responsible for all possible consequences and outcomes. Among other patients’ responsibilities are provision of accurate information on complaints and health history, keep their hospital bills paid in timely manner, and respect other patients’ and staff’s right along with regulations of the institution.
To conclude, practical healthcare brings a number of issues that can be reviewed from legal and ethical perspective. So, in order to develop the best decision regarding or reaction to situation, it is important to consider it from the different angles. One of the most common examples of interconnection of law and ethics is the issue of patients’ and healthcare staff’s responsibilities.
