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Health Care, Emerging Challenges, and the Helping Professions

(6 CEUs in Professional Ethics for Full Day; 3 CEUs for the Half-Day Course)

Course Description

This is the second course based on elements of the six-hour workshop of years past, Ethical Problems in Health Care, Social Services, and Public Policy. People in the helping professions see working for positive social change as a significant part of their mission. This work inevitably and extensively involves health care institutions, policy, delivery, access, and the like. The main goal of the course is to bring about a better understanding of the ongoing, evolving, and emerging challenges, ethical and otherwise, that affect the provision and maintenance of health care and that affect efforts to make health care policy and practice more effective, equitable, and sustainable.

Learning Objectives

Participants who complete this course should be able to:

Describe some of the principal ethical problems that complicate the provision of social services such as health care
Discuss the responsibility of the helping professions to effect positive social change
Discuss the responsibility, if any, of the community to provide essential services to its members who are in need
Identify fundamental ethical principles of health care and social services and ways in which such principles can be applied
Identify some of the ongoing and/or evolving challenges in our country and beyond concerning access to and maintenance of adequate health care for all peopleIdentify and explain various kinds of diversity among people

Course Outline

I. Introduction
    A. Keynote: in search of a system
    B. What is health care ethics?
    C. Essential services
    D. Social change and the helping professions
    E. The Code of Ethics of the NASW

II. Fundamental principles of health care ethics - reviewed
    A. Ethical theory and health care
    B. Respect for autonomy
    C. Nonmaleficence, beneficence, and benevolence
    D. Justice
    E. Compassion and mercy

III. The ethics of public policy and the provision of social services
    A. Basic needs
    B. Some current challenges to meeting basic needs
    C. The special responsibility of members of the helping professions
    D. Ethical principles

IV. Applying health care and public policy ethics under current conditions
    A. Patients’ rights
    B. Access to care
    C. Human embryonic stem cell research
    D. Genetic engineering: therapy and enhancement
    E. Addiction and substance abuse
    F. End of life care

V. Conclusion
    A. Maintaining a comprehensive ethical outlook
    B. Private practice and public service
    C. Our original problem revisited

Bibliography and suggestions for further reading

Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers. Approved by the 1996 NASW Delegate Assembly and revised by the 1999 NASW Delegate Assembly. www.socialworkers.org/pubs/code/code.asp

DSM-IV-TR: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4^th edition, text revision. American Psychiatric Association, 2000.

Three Special Articles in the The New England Journal of Medicine, 353:7, August 18, 2005. Online edition: http://content.nejm.org/content/vol353/issue7/index.shtml

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Sir David Ross. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Beauchamp, Tom L., et al, eds. Contemporary Issues in Bioethics. 7^th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 2008.

Feinberg, Joel. Social Philosophy. Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Kant, Immanuel. Foundations (or Groundwork) of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). There are many editions currently available.

Mappes, Thomas and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy. 6^th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. See especially Chapter 1, “Abortion”; Chapter 2, “Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide”; Chapter 6, “Drug Control and Addiction”; and Chapter 7, “Social and Economic Justice”.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism (1863). There are many editions currently available of the entire book, often as a part of a collection of readings.

Rachels, James, and Stuart Rachels. Elements of Moral Philosophy. 6^th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Reamer, Frederic G. Ethical Standards in Social Work. NASW Press, 1998.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Cyrus Hoy ed., 2^nd edition. W. W. Norton, 1992.

David L. Prentiss, PhD

Good Thinking Works, 2009

www.goodthinkingworks.com

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