Healthcare professionals must have a strong working knowledge of ethics and law to be competent and successful. A qualified professional knows how to
provide safe, quality healthcare to a population of culturally diverse consumers. To address the needs of all patients, you can apply models such as shared
decision making, where patients are encouraged to share their preferences and needs. The application of this model requires that healthcare professionals know
how to apply ethical theories such as patient autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and fidelity when caring for patients. On a daily basis, healthcare
professionals face ethical dilemmas involving patients and colleagues. Understanding how to effectively apply the code of ethics in your field, and various other
codes of professional conduct, is an important skill required of all healthcare professionals. By applying ethical decision making, you positively impact the
delivery of safe, quality healthcare.
Under certain circumstances, healthcare professionals can be sued by patients for malpractice; it is more common for physicians to be sued when patients are
injured or die as a result of their medical care. Healthcare professionals need a clear understanding of the elements of medical malpractice (standard of care,
breach, causation, and damages) and how they are applied by a judge in a court of law. Healthcare professionals play a critical role due to the nature of their
relationship with both patients and physicians. To remain competent and grow in the field, healthcare professionals are expected to understand how their
professional responsibility includes a wide-ranging accountability to self, their profession, their patients, and the public.
Your final case study for this course will require you to analyze a court decision in which a physician was found liable for medical malpractice. You will focus on
facts pertaining to the medical standard of care, breach of care, and causation, and explain how they were applied to law. You will then use the facts of the case
to identify an ethics issue and determine an ethical theory that would help provide a safe, quality healthcare experience for the patient. Next, you will apply a
clinician–patient shared decision-making model to describe how the ethics issue could be resolved. You will also include a discussion about possible violations of
the code of ethics in your given field. Lastly, you will augment or vary the facts of the case to create a hypothetical scenario that changes the outcome so that
the physician is no longer liable for medical malpractice.
Final Project I is divided into two milestones, which will be submitted at various points throughout the course to scaffold learning and ensure quality final
submissions. These milestones will be submitted in Modules Three and Five. The final product will be submitted in Module Seven.
In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:
Analyze the impact of healthcare-related policy and legislature with regard to culturally diverse healthcare consumers and providers
1
Ethical theories and decision-making models
Determine ethical theories and decision-making models appropriate for healthcare providers to use for providing a safe, quality healthcare experience
for the patient
Analyze the role of professional regulation, the standard of care, and codes of ethics in determining healthcare providers’ wide-ranging accountability to
self, their profession, their patients, and the public
Prompt
In this project, you will analyze a court case involving medical malpractice. Using your analysis of the case, you will address the facts pertaining to the medical
standard of care, breach of care, and causation. Further, you will use the facts from the original case to identify an ethics issue, determine an ethical theory that
would help provide a safe and quality healthcare experience for the patient, apply a clinician–patient shared decision-making model, and augment or vary the
facts of the case to change the outcome
Sample Solution
