Introduction
Ethical advice in the healthcare industry can dramatically impact important outcomes, such as a reduction in the time spent in intensive care and an increase in family and medical provider satisfaction. The preservation and embracement of a person’s dignity and well-being are fundamental principles of the NOHS Code of Ethics. Human service workers seek the information, training, experience, and supervision required to assure efficacy when dealing with people from diverse cultural origins. Social workers need to build on this foundational knowledge and broaden their systematic application of protocols if they are to offer patients high-quality care while adhering to the rules. The study’s goal is to evaluate the major issues and difficulties related to ethics in social work settings with a primary emphasis on the dignity and welfare of the individual.
Common Ethical Dilemmas in Social Work
Legal Aspects
Naturally, social workers are required to maintain client privacy and cannot talk to anybody else about their client’s affairs. The reporter is less divided if the situation is obvious, such as when there has been substantial trauma or abuse. However, clients may insist that they are not being abused, despite having a minor injury that is constant with abusive handling. The social worker may have ethical difficulties, mainly if the parent-child or spouse-child relationship is weak enough to be harmed by an investigation. Preventing this problem is the most effective way to correct it, or at least to make it simpler. A social worker should advise a client at the beginning of their working relationship that all data is kept confidential, except for reports of self-harm and damage to others.
Ethical standards are ingrained in many social work practices, which are supported by laws, rules, procedures, and guidelines. For instance, it is vital to perform mental health exams to give participants the chance to voice their opinions, be respectful, and ensure the privacy of sensitive and personal data (Banks & Rutter, 2022). While ensuing concerns are inherent to the process, social workers might not actively take them into account. The only time ethical concerns become apparent and need re-evaluating what is morally correct in a given circumstance is when a specific case emerges.
Cultural Considerations
Human care personnel should consider certain conventions while making ethical and professional judgments as unexpected circumstances may arise often. Practical ethical conundrums could be at odds with the relevant laws, work requirements, cultural norms, accrediting organizations, and moral feelings (Reamer, 2022). To ensure deliberate judgments, it is crucial to follow ethical decision-making practices and consider racial, ethnic, or gender aspects (Reamer, 2022). Moral standards may be used to settle disputes over the behavior of human care workers, even if they are not legally binding agreements.
NOHS Standard for Patient’s Dignity and Well-Being
Patient’s Dignity
The concepts of dignity and well-being are implied by the NOHS’s core standard in this essay. Human service professionals seek the knowledge, training, practice, and supervision necessary to ensure their effectiveness while working with persons from different cultural backgrounds. Sex, gender, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic position, ethnicity, or participation in other historically persecuted groups are frequently included. They will also work to increase their expertise in methods known to be most beneficial for the population, representing a variety of features.
Equality in Social Care
While preventative ethics seeks to achieve the goal of averting conflict, it has limitations since various agencies or experts may come to different conclusions on the same infringement if there are no set rules inside that professional organization. Despite this drawback, the focus of preventative ethics is on using the codes of ethics of professional groups within agencies to create complete policies that guide and deal with ethical decision-making at the program level (Winfield et al., 2017). The rules aid professionals in preparing for circumstances that call for quick action, offer direction on how to handle certain issues, encourage communication and equality among coworkers, and reaffirm adherence to institutional values. Additionally, they aid in the clarification of the company objective, advance correct and timely client communication, and define what actions are morally unacceptable, morally obligatory, and ethically acceptable (Winfield et al., 2017). The idea of preventative ethics involves the duty of creating ethical regulations that represent moral decision-making and equality in the industry. Policies encourage actions that uphold the ethical standards of the profession and follow the rules and laws applicable to the industry.
Consultations and Discussions on Ethics
Informal Professional Discussions
When faced with moral dilemmas, workers from this sphere sometimes have the alternative of informal talks with their peers. These chats frequently take place through phone conversations, videoconference sessions, or in-person meetings at the offices of coworkers or social workers. The patient’s file or chart is not updated as a result of these informal ethical conversations. In their interpersonal consultation groups, particularly those focused on autonomous practice, social workers may engage in casual chats with their peers. By reducing the time spent in an intensive-care unit and raising family and health professional satisfaction, ethics consultation in medicine can have a major positive influence on important outcomes. Practitioners who come upon a complex, perhaps quite disturbing, case-specific ethical problem often have access to them.
Roles of Social Workers
Ethics consultants can serve several different roles, depending on the employment setting, responsibilities, and training and expertise of the social worker. Staff workers who have formal training may offer ethics consulting at major human service organizations like hospitals. Medical employees could theoretically be educated to provide ethics consultation, even though these individuals know bioethical matters (for example, moral choices about final care, organ transplant and allotment, genetic modification, and reproductive rights). All social workers should be knowledgeable about the psychological health implications of war trauma and humanitarian crises (Adamek, 2022). In-house carers may be helpful in various diverse contexts, including the military, child welfare organizations, mental health facilities, and school systems. Social workers must participate in challenging continuing education to ensure the necessary knowledge and skills relevant to ethical consultation.
Practice Implications
Interprofessional Interactions
The use of informal ethics conversations, comprehensive ethics discussions, ethical codes, and ethics rounds are all valuable strategies for enhancing practitioners’ moral judgment. Social workers who work in agencies can spot coworkers who have a keen interest in morality and set up a meeting to talk about developing agency-based guidelines (Reamer, 2022). Independent practitioners can proactively address and handle complex ethical concerns in peer consultation sessions.
The client’s autonomy and security must be balanced responsibly by the social worker. Furthermore, couples ought to set this precedence from the beginning of their partnership. For instance, if a patient wishes to fight for guardianship of their kids but has not made enough progress in addressing their substance addiction and behavioral issues as required by the court. Before returning to the legal procedure, the social worker must shift attention to these crucial stages.
Adaptation to Emergencies
Additionally, unprecedented conditions, a scenario that is continually changing, and contentious answers that differ by region, geography, political structures, socioeconomic situations, and other aspects such as COVID-19 influence the perception of ethics. Many nations have experienced a lack of medical resources, including physicians, nurses, disposable masks, ventilators, and care beds (Dominelli, 2021). Even in emergency departments and intensive care units, the availability of tests and hospital beds has been hampered by insufficient resources. As a result, the solution to the ethical dilemma might be to improvise, prioritize, target, and limit the use of safety clothing only for medical professionals and people who are extremely ill or vulnerable to coronavirus (Dominelli, 2021). For example, if there are fewer ventilators and hospital beds available than there are patients who need them, this places health and social service personnel in untenable ethical situations where they must choose whose life is more valuable. Therefore, certain situations require a specific and creative approach to resolve the problem considering the moral code.
Conclusion
Conflicts between ethical difficulties and applicable laws, occupational requirements, cultural norms, accrediting organizations, and personal convictions might arise. To ensure deliberate judgments, it is crucial to follow ethical decision-making practices. Concerns concerning the behavior of those who provide care for people can be addressed using moral standards. Preventative ethics is focused on developing comprehensive policies that direct and address ethical decision-making at the implementation level utilizing the codes of ethics of professionals inside agencies. Critical results, such as a reduction in the duration of stay in an intensive care unit and an increase in family satisfaction, can be strongly impacted by ethics consulting in healthcare. In order to guarantee that they have the information and skills essential for ethical consulting, social workers must engage in demanding continuing education.
References
Adamek, M. E. (2022). Spring 2022 Editorial: Supporting diversity and discovering the virtues of virtual practice.Advances in Social Work, 22(1), i-iv. Web.
Banks, S., & Rutter, N. (2022). Pandemic ethics: Rethinking rights, responsibilities and roles in social work.The British Journal of Social Work, 52(6), 3460-3479. Web.
Dominelli, L. (2021). A green social work perspective on social work during the time of COVID‐19. International Journal of Social Welfare, 30(1), 7-16. Web.
Reamer, F. G. (2022). Managing ethics challenges in social work organizations: A comprehensive strategy.Advances in Social Work, 22(1), 14-32. Web.
Winfield, C., Sparkman-Key, N., & Vajda, A. (2017). Professional standards: Embracing preventive ethics in human services. Journal of Human Services, 37(1), 55-62. Web.