1. Beyond Personal & Professional Decision Making
The Ethics of Caring
Beyond Personal & Professional Decision Making

2. Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson
What is ethics?
Ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.
Ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards
Is legal the same as ethical?
What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well founded reasons.
Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

3. Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson
What is ethics?
The enterprise of disciplined reflection on moral intuitions and moral choices.
Moral values are examined
What ought to be done in a given situation.
Ethical principles form moral choices as persons act as moral agents.
Various Professional disciplines have individual Codes of Ethics
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

4. Ethics in the Service Environment
The Health Care & Human Service Environment hosts many professional disciplines.
Each discipline’s codes of ethics have similar principles and they are generally not in conflict but supportive and mutual.
Quality in the human service and healthcare service environment does not only include technical and service quality, but also ethical quality.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

5. Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson
Code of Ethics
Individual/Personal value system
Personal Standards – Respect, Trust and Confidence
Professional/Discipline Code of Ethics
Based on various ethical theories
Used as tool to define and understand crisis in decision making and resolve differences.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

6. Guiding Principles in Ethics
Integrity
Objectivity
Professional Confidence
Confidentiality
Professional Behavior
Technical Standards
Source: Advancing Government Accountability
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

7. The Healthcare/Human Service Environment
“In human service/healthcare the person’s good is achieved across a spectrum of biomedical, spiritual, functional, and emotional needs. Thus, the provider addresses the physical, psychological, functional, emotional and societal needs of individuals, families, and communities. Often, ethical dilemmas arise because of the necessity for making choices in how to meet these human needs. Ethical principles & theories both contribute to systematic reasoning to achieve the good in decision making.”
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

8. The Healthcare/Human Service Environment
Clinical ethics versus institutional ethics
Value structure of an organization
Does not just depend on leadership
Ethics must be inherent in the organizational culture.
Holistic systems approach.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

9. Organizational Culture
“In any attempt to change the values of an organization, whether it is through the education of its participants in moral principles, or the imposition of leadership committed to higher ethical principles, the contents of the existing organizational culture must be dealt with directly for positive change to occur. Ignoring culture in attempting to refocus the values orientation of an organization is similar to ignoring causes and treating symptoms.” Mary Cipriano Silva, Ph.D., RN, FAAN
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

10. Organizational Culture
Values and ethics are not only central to organizational culture but also to positive organizational performance.
Institutions have ethical lives and characteristics just as their individual members do.
Must disengage behaviors and practices that compromise the organizational culture or causes the organization to become ethically deviant.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

11. Organizational Culture: Building an Ethics Infrastructure
Conduct a formal process to clarify and articulate the organization's values and link them to the mission and vision.
Facilitate communication and learning about ethics and ethical issues, including values clarification and reflection on their link to practice.
Create structures that encourage and support the culture.
Create processes to monitor and offer feedback on ethical performance.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

12. Organizational Culture: Building an Ethics Infrastructure
To prevent deviant organizational structures, human service professionals should consider:
extending their horizons and that of their staff beyond their own discipline and attend business classes and seminars on organizational ethics,
read business journals and books on ethics and organizational structure,
understand that hidden behind many decisions they make is an ethical issue waiting to be explored, and
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

13. Organizational Culture: Building an Ethics Infrastructure
Healthcare and human service providers who exist within an environment with positive and effective ethical culture will typically not get caught in the cross fire of administration, rules, regulations, policies and practices, and/or funding limitations that prevent people from receiving the type of care that is available.
This type of environment will protect and defend the human dignity of the professional and re-humanize the health or human service that is being provide.
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

14. Making and Ethical Decision
Recognize the Ethical Issue
Get the Facts
Relevant Facts
Individuals and groups with an important stake in decision
What are the options for acting?
Evaluate Alternative Actions
Make a Decision and Test It
Act and Reflect the Outcomes
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

15. Approaches to Ethical Business Decision-Making
Utilitarian -Action that will result in the greatest good for greatest numbers.
Moral Rights – Moral principles, regardless of consequences. At times simply right or wrong.
Universalism- 1) Should decision apply to all and 2) Are you willing to have rule applied to you?
Cost-Benefit – Balance the costs and benefits vs. not taking any action.
Source: Managementhelp.org
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson

16. Resources Code of Ethics Websites
Barbara Gordon & Molly Dobson