The Ethics of Running a Medical Business
- Mark Edwards ·
- 0 Comments ·
- June 24, 2024
When you are in charge of a medical business, you have the great feeling of knowing that you are probably helping quite a lot of people in quite a lot of ways. That’s a great thing to be doing, and something that you may well find sustains you pretty well. There are however a number of ethical concerns that you’ll need to be aware of with this kind of business, and it’s something you should certainly make sure you are thinking about. Here are some of the ethical questions around this kind of business that you should be aware of.
Confidentiality
This is perhaps the major thing that you should be aware of, and you’re going to need to make sure that you have all sorts of processes in place to ensure that you are getting this right. Confidentiality is all about doing everything in your power to keep the information you hold about your patients and customers as safe as possible. There might always be risks here, but you are trying to keep them to a minimum as far as possible. As long as you are doing that, you can be said to be doing your bit here.
Safety
Basically everything you do in the medical world is about safety – the safety of your staff as well as patients and customers. So you will find that there are a huge number of things you need to be doing along the way to ensure that you are keeping your people safe and secure, and it’s something that you can approach from a number of angles. From employing the best doctors to storing items properly in vaccine fridges and so on, it’s all central to ensuring that people are kept as safe as possible, so you should make sure to resemble that.
Safeguarding
This is similar to safety but it’s also something in its own right, and you should be sure to therefore think about it as a separate item. Safeguarding is less to do with what you are actively doing as a company, and more about spotting when people in the community are likely to be victims of unsafe situations. In other words, you’ll have to train your staff to spot signs of abuse and other such problems, so that these can be handled sensitively and properly. That kind of safeguarding is a really vital part of the ethics of all medicine.
First Do No Harm
This Hippocratic oath is obviously a very famous idea, and it’s one that you hear a lot in the medical world. That’s not without reason – it is certainly a very strong way to approach managing patients and looking after them, and if your doctors and other staff always keep this maxim in mind it’s certainly going to help a lot with keeping everyone safe. So you should make sure to take this seriously as well if you want to keep things ethical wherever possible.