Buy essay on Ethical Principles

One component that determines the state of health care is the medical ethics, which plays an essential role in the daily treatment and prevention activities. The reliability and objectivity of determining health care problems, including its ethical aspects, are possible only at a comparative assessment of positive and negative trends in its development in various countries. Medical ethics, culture, morality, determine to a large extent the “face” of health care, and these elements are sometimes leveled, and their importance is minimized, especially in the process of rapid development of health care as a branch, where economics, medicinal diagnostic modern technology, biomedical research, pharmacotherapy, etc. come foreground.
In these circumstances, such category of medical ethics as the rights of patients suffering from chronic diseases and prone to severe pathological states acquires special importance. Patients’ rights, and especially the rights for obtaining qualified medical assistance, as well as for information (including the patient’s consent to the use of certain diagnostic and therapeutic interventions), get in now essential. In recent years the problem of protecting the rights of patients are under active consideration by WHO and the Council of Europe. Legal issues of health and medical ethics are the priorities of the Committees on Health Care and Medical Ethics of the Council of Europe.
As already mentioned, the provision of skilled care to patients is the main criterion for the protection of the interests and rights of the patient. According to Brock (2001), the ability to use modern diagnostic techniques, minimizing diagnostic errors is the basic requirement for the competence of health workers. Training of medical personnel, medical education should be further improved, especially in the control of knowledge and skills, the creation and use of effective educational programs, modern teaching technologies. All this should help to improve the quality of medical diagnostic work, so necessary to meet the needs of the population.
The questions of medical ethics are being evolved – from the not loosing their relevance, the so-called “old” issues, such as medical ethics in testing pharmacological drugs and equipment, with the participation of patients, to the “modern” issues, such as the availability of counterfeit medicines on the pharmaceutical market, the receipt and use of stem cells in medical practice. Stewart (2005) emphasized that increasing the number of counterfeit drugs poses a considerable danger for patients who use these drugs, unaware that they are ineffective and sometimes harmful. The using of stem cells is not usually scientifically approved and creates certain problems in medical and cosmetic practice. Thus, the “old” and the “new” problems of medical ethics tell about a significant increase in the spectrum of ethical issues in health care.
A special place in the question of patients’ rights belongs to such diseases as tuberculosis and HIV infection. Evans (2001) demonstrated that prevention and treatment of these diseases require a high level of professionalism and substantial financial allocations. Protection of these patients is the duty of the State. Financial position of health workers, their working conditions, legal protection are the range of problems that also need to be solved.
In recent years, the commercialization of health care creates new ethical problems. Butts and Rich (2005) stated that high levels of commercialization change the psychology of health workers. Thus, British experts say that in those hospitals where at an equal footing with public beds are the private beds, the staff moral is worse than in the hospitals, where only the so-called budget beds of the national health system function. The conclusion is: the element of payment distorts the morality of health care workers, so the “confusion” of free and paid services in one medical establishment should be avoided. Some organizers of the U.S. Public Health believe that the profit is the main objective of health care and that health care is fully exposed to the market philosophy, although it is well known that the main objective of health care is health.
When money stand between the patient and the doctor the professional nature and the perception of received and rendered services are distorted, and this should be remembered because the paid medicine is expanding its place in the everyday medical and diagnostic practice.
The increase of the proportion of paid services in the health care system is motivated by market relations and market economy, and if we assume that the health care is the subject of the market, then everything that happens in the health care system can be explained in one degree or another.
The paid medical services in our country were introduced about 20 years ago. This was seen initially as a progressive element of the so-called health care reform. But these changes did not affect significantly on the indicators of public health. The result of these “reforms” was only the enrichment of individual health professionals working in the commercial health care. It is necessary to consider the ideas for reforming the health care to their implementation in daily practice for these defects of health care did not affect the process of development of new national projects and on the health care in general.

References
Brock, D. (2001). Quality of Life Measures in Health Care and Medical Ethics. Bioethics Ed. John Harris. New York: Oxford University Press.
Butts, J. and Rich, K. (2005). “Moral and Ethical Dimensions in Professional Nursing Practice,” Role Development in Professional Nursing Practice. Ed. Kathleen Masters. Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
Evans, T. (2001). Challenging Inequities in Health: From Ethics to Action. Oxford University Press.
Guttman, N. (1997). “Ethical Dilemmas in Health Campaigns.” Health Communication, Vol. 9.
Stewart, M. (2005). “The Social Context of Professional Nursing,” Role Development in Professional Nursing Practic. Ed. Kathleen Masters. Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.