Integrity and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals: Analysis of Wrong-Site Surgery Case
Overview
This essay analyzes a case of wrong-site surgery at Arkansas Children Hospital through the lens of virtue ethics, focusing on integrity as a moral obligation for healthcare professionals. The paper examines how the surgeons' failure to disclose the error promptly represents a breach of integrity, accountability, and the fundamental oath physicians take to protect patient welfare.
What this essay covers
- Definition and importance of integrity in healthcare practice with reference to Pozgar's framework
- Analysis of the Arkansas Children Hospital case demonstrating failure of accountability and disclosure
- Discussion of moral and ethical obligations of surgeons and the distinction between human error and unethical concealment
- Examination of how integrity manifests through professional culture, trust, and moral responsibility
Preview
Integrity and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals
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Integrity and Ethical Issues for Health Professionals
The case presents a lack of integrity from the Arkansas Children Hospital surgeons who wrongly operated on the boy. Pozgar (2019) defines integrity as the rigid adherence to ethical or strict moral codes and the commitment of not compromising the codes. Health care professionals and patients usually make health care decisions based on their strict moral beliefs and integrity; a person lacking personal integrity fails to meet the ethical and moral beliefs. The surgeons who operated on the boy wrongly should have had a moral obligation to ensure that the right information was available before they start the operation. Due to their qualified training, they were expected to ensure no harm could happen to the child when the operation was carried out.
Integrity is concerned with accountability and reliability. The wrong side operation illustrates cases of failure of the surgeons to portray accountability since they knew they had made an error while operating. Still, they did not inform the family at the right time. Accountability and honesty are good virtues for health professionals to act and follow up on ethical guidelines. The hospital surgeons were supposed to take up the mistake of operating the child wrongly, then find the solution and rectify the error before the damage became severe (Pozgar, 2019).
Surgeons and other health professionals take an oath of office to protect and take care of the life of their patients.