Ethical and Legal Concepts: Federal Regulations for Quality Healthcare

This essay provides an overview of ethical and legal concepts crucial for ensuring patient safety and delivering high-quality healthcare. It emphasizes the importance of understanding and implementing these frameworks within healthcare organizations. The essay discusses key concepts such as informed consent, beneficence, non-maleficence, confidentiality, and privacy, highlighting their direct impact on patient well-being. Furthermore, it examines specific federal regulations like the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA), HIPAA privacy rule, and the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), illustrating how these laws contribute to maintaining patient safety and quality of care. The essay concludes by underscoring the significance of ethical and legal compliance in preventing errors, reducing patient suffering, and promoting a culture of safety within healthcare settings. Desklib provides access to a wealth of resources, including similar essays and solved assignments, for students seeking to deepen their understanding of healthcare ethics and law.

Ethical And Legal Concepts, Including Specific
Federal Regulations To Ensure The Delivery Of High
Quality Health Care That Protects Patient Safety

Introduction:
• Patient safety can be defined simply as the prevention of adverse effects
and errors to patients associated with healthcare
• As result of the complexities, unexpected as well as unwanted events can
take place in any of the settings within the healthcare organization
• it is the duty of the healthcare organization and its staff to undertake
effective measures and maintain all ethical an legal concepts that reduce
the chance of any errors subsequently.

overview: compromised patient safety
• Unsafe practices might result in medication errors, errors in treatments,
missed interventions, omissions, and many others
• Poor documentation can also lead to errors in services along with longer
stays of patients in hospitals; (Hunter et al., 2016)
• readmission of patients, greater suffering of the patients, increased
financial costs as well as mental and emotional turmoil for patients and
family members

Informed consent:
• Patients should be disclosed about the details of the disorder they have
developed.
• by complete explanation of the treatment interventions and their
advantages and disadvantages
• Asking for informed consent is seen to be intricately associated with
patient safety
• consent have shown a significant decrease in the incident of medical
errors, leading to safer healthcare for patients and providers

beneficence
• Beneficence and non-maleficence are two ethical concepts that are found
to be intricately associated with the maintenance of safety of the patients.
• Beneficence means providing the safest and highest quality healthcare
services to patients that ensure the best health outcomes for the patients

non maleficence
• non-maleficence refers to the ethical concept which means that
professionals should always need to avoid causation of any harm.
• healthcare professionals need to refrain themselves from providing
ineffective treatments as well as acting with the malice towards the
patients

Confidentiality and privacy
• information should be preserved without revealing to any other members
without the permission of the patient (Kangasniemi et al., 2015)
• safety of the patient might be compromised

PSQIA: Patient Safety and Quality
Improvement Act of 2005
• This law helps in establishing a voluntary reporting system for mainly
enhancing the data available for assessing and resolving the patient safety
and health care quality issues.
• This act also covers the topics of confidentiality

HIPPA privacy rule:
• The rule puts significance on the for appropriately safeguarding and
protecting the privacy of the personal health information
• crucial information needs to be protected which when leaked might result
in physical harm or emotional and mental turmoil of the patients (Landau
et al., 2015)

Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP)
• cause reductions to the different payouts towards the care facilities that
experience excessive patient readmissions (Solove, 2016).
• By reducing the payouts of such healthcare organizations, will make them
more careful to maintain patient safety so that readmission can be
prevented

Access to care and patient safety:
• Professionals are seen to struggle for helping patients who lack the
resources for covering their treatment they need being exposed to threats
and danger
• Justice needs to be maintained where people from various backgrounds
should get the scope of equal care services in the nation

Conclusion
• Patient safety is an important aspect of healthcare delivery
• Improper care services might lead to suffering of the patients
• Ethical and legal frameworks can help in ensuring safety of patients
successfully.

References
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review. Journal of advanced nursing, 71(8), 1744-1757.
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Springer, London.
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