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Healthcare systems are complex in that they are diverse in both structure (e.g. nursing units, pharmacies, emergency departments, operating rooms) and professional mix (e.g. nurses, physicians, pharmacists, administrators, therapists) and made up of multiple interconnected elements with adaptive tendencies in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience.
Medical ethics is an applied branch of ethics which analyzes the practice of clinical medicine and related scientific research. [1] Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict.
Medical ethics shares many principles with other branches of healthcare ethics, such as nursing ethics. A bioethicist assists the health care and research community in examining moral issues involved in our understanding of life and death, and resolving ethical dilemmas in medicine and science.
Increasing or decreasing one results in changes to one or both of the other two. For example, a policy that increases access to health services would lower quality of health care and/or increase cost. The desired state of the triangle, high access and quality with low cost represents value in a health care system. [3]
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One example illustrating this concept is the trolley problem. Morality and ethical theory allows for judging relative costs, so in the case when a harm to be inflicted in violating #1 is negligible and the harm prevented or benefit gained in #2–4 is substantial, then it may be acceptable to cause one harm to gain another benefit.
The philosophy of healthcare is the study of the ethics, processes, and people which constitute the maintenance of health for human beings. [citation needed] For the most part, however, the philosophy of healthcare is best approached as an indelible component of human social structures.
In most systems, healthcare providers have a legal and ethical responsibility to ensure that a patient's consent is informed. This principle applies more broadly than healthcare intervention, for example to conduct research, to disclose a person's medical information, or to participate in high risk sporting and recreational activities.