Ethics and values
Medical and health service managers should have values such as good professional judgement, dependability, and be moral. Ocak, Köseoglu & Yildiz (2017) explain that the ethics of Medical and health service managers encompasses many ethical issues, all of which have either a direct or an indirect influence on the delivery of healthcare services. Health service managers are usually educated in master’s degree programs that emphasize on the ethics of medicine. Apart from the guidance that is provided by healthcare organisations, health service managers are required to develop a personal code of conduct. This personal code of conduct is developed from life experience and the professional education that sensitizes them to clinical and managerial ethical issues that they are likely to face. Tønnessen, Ursin & Brinchmann (2017) add that health services managers are required to provide the support that the organisation and its staff needs to ensure that the staff is educated about ethics issues. The managers should also ensure that the staff has learnt the methods that can be used to address the ethical issues by being part of the ethical committees in the organisation.
The key issues in managerial ethics, according to “Health Services Management Ethics” (2019) include:
Consent: medical and health service managers should ensure that patients are informed on the benefits and risks of the services that the healthcare organisation offers. Additionally, the patients should be informed on any alternatives to the services available. The managers should recognise that providing assurance for consent is essential, and establish suitable means that would ensure that consent is sought from patients.
Conflict of interest: in medical and health service management, conflict of interest arises when a manager has two sets of obligations or duties, and taking care of one obligation makes it impossible to take care of the other. The presence of conflict of interest depends on facts, and its determination needs careful scrutiny. Managers can deal with conflict of interest by ensuring that they disclose the conflict of interest and recuse themselves from making the decision.
Staffing: the shortage of healthcare professionals are one of the issues that medical and health service managers have to face. The managers should react to these shortages by reducing by hiring more staff and ensuring that the work environment encourages employee satisfaction in order to attract more qualified employees and to reduce the rate of staff turnovers.
Resource constraints: it is difficult for medical and health services managers to deal with resource constraints mainly because of the scarcity of resources. It is, however, ethical for them to divide the resources in the best manner they can according to the needs of the various sections of the healthcare environment.
Clinical ethical issues: managers need to assure the healthcare staff that they will support them when they need help to minimize, solve, and prevent ethical issues that arise by making improvement and changes in the available support. The managers are also expected to be part of the ethics committees that engage in ethics grand rounds in health services organisations. When the managers have a hands-on involvement in clinical ethical issues, then it will be easy to deal with them.
Quality of care: medical and health services managers have the ethical obligation to ensure that the quality of care offered in the organisation is improved in all of the administrative and clinical processes.
