Healthcare Assignment 2022

Running head: HEALTHCARE ASSIGNMENT
HEALTHCARE ASSIGNMENT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Introduction
The ethics in the healthcare system deals with the values about the human conducts
working in the healthcare system. The ethics considers whether the actions are right or wrong
and also whether the motives undertaken by the medical practitioners are good or bad (Char,
Shah and Magnus 2018). The ethics are the systematic principles or rules governing the
appropriate conducts. The clinical leaders, the healthcare professionals and the patients also daily
face several ethical challenges regarding the privacy and confidentiality of the patient. They also
face challenges about the transmission of diseases that the patients are suffering from, the
relationships that the patients have with the doctors and nurses and the issues of end of life
(Chrisler, Barney and Palatino, 2016). This assignment is dealing with the ethical-legal issue of
incorrect medication to a child of seven month age named Ruth.
Discussion
The case study is about a seven-month-old baby who was born with Tetralogy of Fallot,
which is one of the severe heart diseases. A patient suffering from this disease can only be cured
by surgery. The patient had undergone one surgery at two month age. During the incident as the
child was only seven month age, the pediatric cardiovascular surgeon told that the child would
not be ready for surgery for the next one year. Apart from undergoing the earlier operation, the
heart was functioning inefficiently, and because of this, her heart frequently filled with fluid, and
she used to turn blue and shortness of breath. Whenever the child suffered from breathlessness,
her parents used to take her to the emergency department of the hospital. The doctors used to
provide her with oxygen and medicine so that she could breathe easily. In one such condition,
she was taken by her parents to the hospital, but the nurse provided the child with an adult dose

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of morphine in spite of the pediatric treatment. The other ethical-legal issue happened in the case
study was that the doctor hides about the incidence of administering wrong medicine to the
patient.
Concepts of ethical practice in the chosen scenario
The bioethicists mostly refer to the four basic principles at the time of evaluating the
merits and the demerits of the medical procedures, which are autonomy, justice, beneficence and
non-maleficence. The principle of freedom involves the right of the patient to take part in the
decision making process regarding the healthcare procedure of the patient (Marais and Petersen
2015). The principle of justice involves the ideas that the benefits of the treatments are divided
among all the groups of the society (Clark 2017). The principle of beneficence requires that the
procedure must be prepared with the intention of doing good to the patients involved. The law of
non-maleficence involves that the procedure is not harming the patients involved (Hibbert and
Cunliffe 2015). In the given case, only the principle of beneficence was followed as the
treatment procedure was prepared for the purpose of improving the health condition of the
patient. However, the medicinal error done by the nurse hampered the situation.
The ethico-legal complexities of the situation.
The ethical dilemma or the moral paradox is the problem of the decision making between
two probable imperatives neither of which are acceptable and the complexity that arises from the
situational conflicts while obeying the one (Stiggelbout, Pieterse and De Haes 2015). In the
given case study, the first ethical issue arose when the patient was administered with the wrong
dose of medicine by the nurse. The nurse by mistake administered an adult dose of morphine
because of which Ruth started suffering from respiratory arrest and stopped breathing entirely for