Focusing on Duties of Health Care Professionals during Pandemic of Highly Contagious Diseases such as SARS and Ebola
Recent experience in dealing with outbreaks of Ebola and SARS in Africa proved that he health care professionals often fail to adhere to their duties. The 2006 World Health Organization Reports underscore the importance of considering ethical and legal obligations of health care professionals.
Ambiguity of ethical codes and legal provisions requires in-depth analysis of these issues to define what should be done to improve the situation. In this memo, a proposal will be introduced.
Proposal on Improving the Quality of Health Care Services
First, health care professionals should pay attention to legal issues and provisions. In this respect, the World Health Organization issues International Health Regulations that aims to enhance regional, global, and national health securityi.
The key provisions relate to the evaluation of response and surveillance capacities, as well as timely reporting on SARS diseases outbreaks. The task of health care professionals is to develop efficient response mechanism premised on their rights and obligations.
Second, the shift should also be introduced to the employment environment with regard to the duties of health care professionals during pandemic. In particular, it is highly important to work out a plan that would allow the employees to response efficiently to contingencies during a pandemic.
While introducing new provisions, the task of the employers should consist in observing processes stipulated in the employment agreement, providing the employees with content of the proposed variations. The employer should also inform employees about duties and responsibilities.
Finally, the employer should provide their employees with an opportunity to receive advice concerning his responsive actions during the outbreaks. All these strategies should contribute greatly to the development of a new effective intervention framework.
Third, certain regulations should be worked out to address ethical and moral codes during a pandemic. This is of particular concern to equitable access to prophylactic and precautious measures, boarder control, isolation, social-distances policies, and transnational issues introduced by the government.
The international organizations should underscore the importance of obligations and duties of health care professionals. The point is that pandemics strongly relate to the way communities are able to response to these problems and, therefore, public health preparedness is a priority in such issues.
The health professionals should pay closer attention to the human rights of people before they are allowed to participate in such missions.
Finally, public health authorities should adhere to the ethical and moral principles to prevent harm to society in general. It is their moral duty to make a person participate in activities preventing harm to other individuals.
The use of compulsion is justified because they seek to eliminate threats to life of the community in general. Nevertheless, the necessity requirements should follow the standards because there should be a rational basis for stating that the intervention is an obligator action.
Distributive justice is another approach that should be considered to improve health situation among vulnerable populations.
In conclusion, the proposal is worth considering because it offers a fresh outlook on the current problems with reference to previous practices. The leading health care organization should be more concerned with the pandemic and outbreaks of such dangerous diseases as SARS and Ebola.
References
World Health Organization. International Health Regulations. 2005. Web.