Legal and Ethical Considerations in Healthcare: A Case Study

Case Study

Contents
INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY.............................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES..........................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Healthcare is referred to as maintenance of health and plays a major role in a person’s life
throughout childhood, adulthood up to old age. Consumers possess certain rights when it comes
to clinical decision making (Atkins and et. al., 2017). This essay is about Doris, who is a 79-
year-old woman living with her husband Peter. She was brought to a hospital after a fall at her
home and immediately taken for x-rays. The nurse who was caring for Doris found that Peter had
the inability to completely understand and legally provide a consent for his wife. The main issues
that will be discussed in the essay are legal and ethical considerations relating to health care. A
description of consent, confidentiality and privacy along with the elements that are required for
an action of medical negligence is also provided.
MAIN BODY
After a fall at her home, Doris, a 79-year-old woman, was brought to the hospital via an
ambulance. Before this, she was active and independently took care of her 88 years old husband,
Peter. After an assessment at the hospital, it was revealed that Doris had fractured her right hip
and a surgery was required. A nurse had been taking care of Doris and she sometimes used to
spend tie with both Doris as well as Peter. It was during this time that Peter identified problems
with his memory and had sometimes got lost while driving back home (Australian Health
Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), 2014). This led to the nurse having concerns about
Peter’s ability to understand the proposed operative procedure for Doris and legally provide
consent for the same. Upon contacting the surgeon, she got replied with that the consent form
had already bee signed which was sufficient and that the surgery would process in any case. This
led the nurse to her Unit Manager who told her to document the same in Doris’s medical chart.
Prior to when Doris went into the operation theatre, Bert, one of their neighbors came to visit
her. He told that he had been regularly helping them and was ready to sign a consent form if
required.
The surgeon who had to perform the surgery decided to take an off and instead delegated
the operation to a junior doctor who was inexperienced. The junior doctor injured Doris’s hip
which caused her continual pain and also decreased her mobility. In this case, it can be observed
that the surgeon had showed negligence towards his duty by delegating the operation to a junior