Clinical Ethics (LPN Nursing)

The physician–patient relationship is an important component of health care delivery. (The terms physician and clinician will be used interchangeably here, acknowledging that other clinicians have similar relationships with patients and are bound by the same code of ethics.) Except in emergencies, before a clinician can initiate a medical or surgical intervention with a patient, a relationship of trust and empathy must exist, allowing the patient to talk about their medical issues. The clinician–patient relationship is a bond that, in many cases, requires some cultivation and may ultimately result in better outcomes. In the United States, the American Medical Association publishes a code of ethics that details the principles physicians must adhere to in providing medical care; these standards of conduct extend to the physician–patient relationship.

Medical ethics are a set of moral values that guide the decision-making of health care professionals in their daily practice. A sense of ethical responsibility has accompanied the profession of medicine since antiquity, and the Hippocratic oath was the 1st document to codify its core ethical principles (benevolence, autonomy, nonmaleficence, and distributive justice). In the 20th century, bioethics began to explore the moral relationship between humans and their world.

Confidentiality is a set of rules that dictates the protection of health information shared by a patient with a physician. In general, this information should only be used to dictate medical decision-making steps and can only be disclosed to a 3rd party with the patient’s express consent. While there are some specific situations where patient-doctor confidentiality may be broken (e.g., when the patient is at risk for self-harm), these situations are considered exceptions and clinicians ought to make sure that confidentiality is not unnecessarily jeopardized.