In this scenario, medical professionals were faced with an administrative, ethical dilemma that could have resulted in the urgent euthanasia of the patient. On the one hand, the wife of a cancer patient in palliative care, a lawyer, requested urgent euthanasia of her husband for family reasons. On the other hand, urgently inducing the patient’s death may have been an administrative problem for the patient, and it is not sure that it was caused by the wife’s deliberate decision. The principles of normative ethics, in this case, do not provide an unequivocal assessment of what is good and what is wrong. As professionals, medical officers should be held to regulations and comply with the wife’s request if it was not contrary to the code. The decision to seek administrative approval in the middle of the night is not a significant problem. As people with feelings and emotions, the staff may have suspected the wife of being overly urgent, which may well have been evidence of a nervous breakdown (Marchitelli et al., 2020). In this case, initiating an involuntary death protocol seems improper.
From an ethical principlism point of view, and if the patient’s tests were satisfactory, one should have accepted the request of the patient’s wife and increased the dosage of Ativan. The patient’s death was the will of the legal wife, and a disclaimer by a signed statement from the woman would have been a sure guarantee of immunity from trial. Ethical principlism teaches that health care decisions should be based on mercy and doing no harm, and thus euthanasia as granting the wife’s request would be the right decision (Moral theory, 2019). From the perspective of utilitarian ethics, the law should have been paramount, not feelings. Clinic administrators should have taken responsibility for approving euthanasia but should not have rushed them or insisted on a particular choice. Precise adherence to regulations, detached from feeling, is the basis of this type of ethics (Ranju & Serice, 2021). For this reason, euthanasia could have been initiated only if a deliberate decision by the clinic administration, in accordance with the law, would have confirmed it.
References
Marchitelli, B., Shearer, T., & Cook, N. (2020). Factors Contributing to the Decision to Euthanize: Diagnosis, Clinical Signs, and Triggers. The Veterinary clinics of North America. Small Animal Practice, 50(3), 573-589.
Moral theory and the ethical practice of nursing. (2019). Nurse Key.
Ranju, G. A., & Serice, T. (2021). Ethical gap to implement utilitarianism in healthcare policy: A hidden Pandemic Ethics Crisis. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science, 20, 178-182.