Social Responsibility & Ethical Decision-Making

Minimizing medical errors in health care setting
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Medical errors can happen in any place in health care setting: In hospitals, clinics, operation centers, physicians' offices, treatment homes, dispensaries, and patients' homes. Errors can involve wrong medicines, surgery errors, diagnosis, equipment malfunctioning, or either errors in lab reports. Beauchamp (2001) indicates that most errors are product of complexity of the current heath care systems. However, errors can also erupt as a result of poor communication between patients and doctors.
Dealing with medical errors requires application of ethics since setting rules and standards of performance cannot effect efficiently. Ethics seeks understanding between the patients, doctor and even the society at large (Beauchamp, 2001).
Once a mistake occurs in medication process, it is very prudent for hospital management or Physicians to disclose mistakes to patients. It is very difficult to inform patient that an error has occurred, but its best action to take to create understanding between the parties involved. Though the error may end up unnoticed to the patient, the patient is given indication that some reactions of the body might occur due to error hence the pati...