Ethical dilemma?
A medical office manager is setting up home healthcare for a 78 year old man, recently diagnosed with diabetes. The man informs the office manager that he only wants white people in his house. Should the office manager take the patients preferences or prejudices in consideration? Is it ethical or legal to do so? Should healthcare professionas comply with patients requests regarding racial preference?
Comments
Yes, it is an ethical dilemma. Some home health care providers believe that personal care is intimate and private and that compatibility with the care giver is an important dimension of a good patient experience. Patients, they conclude, should have a worker with whom they are comfortable.
However, preventing a worker from performing a particular job simply because of her or his race is a most blatant form of discrimination. When a factor like race--totally unrelated to the ability to do the job--is used as a basis for deciding who does what work, managers are saying that irrelevant and biased considerations will be permitted to influence work assignments.
A good discussion of this here:
http://www.chausa.org/Pub/MainNav/News/HP/Archive/...
Maybe you should not concentrate on a specific ethical dilemma. Perhaps you should try focusing on the subject of ethical dilemmas. For example, we are all faced with ethical dilemmas every minute of every day, such as whether to try to beat a red light, embellishing a story, telling a friend a new dress is pretty, etc. You could then discuss why these simple things are ethical dilemmas and the consequences. This would broaden your subject, thus allowing you to have more information to write a longer paper.
The patient's requests should be taken into consideration. Is the medical office going to treat only those with whom they agree??? What if the doctor is a staunch Democrat? Will he treat Republicans? Political correctness is not a requirement for medical treatment.
I would try to comply with the requests of any of my clients, but I would also inform them that such a request would more than likely be impossible to fulfill. I would then ask what they would like to do about it, putting the problem in their lap. You are not going to change a narrow minded bigot, but you can make it so they have to deal with and manage their own hatred and not have to go against your own ethics and morals.
If I owned the company providing home health care I would tell the man to get another agency. I wouldn't work with someone who was a bigot.
Thats a tough question. I wouldnt want to be associated with this person or classify him as one of my customers. It would ruin the company's image. Sometimes you have to stand by what is right. Maybe telling him that will change his mind but in reality, who wants business from someone like that?