Care values are a set of written rules, which explains how people working in a particular profession should behave.

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Care Values

Care values are a set of written rules, which explains how people working in a particular profession should behave. It’s a document that provides guidance on ethically appropriate and recommended ways of behaving or dealing with certain situation. If a code of practice did not exist, people can get away with whatever they wanted to do. It helps to make people accountable for their actions and protects the rights of service users. Everyone using a care service is entitled to a good standard of practice and care. This means that everyone has equal opportunities in the care service, no one would be excluded because of their ethnicity, gender, and age and health status. Others won’t be preferred or labelled by care practitioner. An example of breaking the equal opportunity care service would be a nurse treating one patient better than another patient in the same clinic. Due to the nurse doing this, the service user that is not treated equally and therefore, would not be performing to their potential and would further struggle to recover. The nurse would apply this care value by helping each service users without labelling and not favouring.

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Equality does not mean that everyone is treated the same. What it does mean is that everyone has equal access to opportunities. This could mean that different people require different support to access opportunities. Being treated with dignity and respect is essential when working in a way that promotes equality. Equality emphases on promoting fairness in services and organisations by the protecting people’s rights. An organisation would promote equality by not directly or indirectly discriminating against a protected characteristic, such as; race, gender, disability, religion or beliefs, sexual orientation and age. In addition the care value seeks out to avert discrimination in all these areas. For example, an elderly service or employee would not be indirectly discriminated by the organisation by putting policies, rules or ways of doing things that have a negative impact on them. The organisation would make adjustments on the policies and rules in order to make it fair for the elderly person. This can be longer breaks or shorter working times. 

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Diversity does not simply refer to heritage and disability, but also gender, nationality and culture, sexual orientation and age. Diversity means in health and social care; is valuing people's capabilities and knowing that they are not 'disabled.’ It means to put the person first. It means not making expectations about their ability or performance. The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and admiration for one another. A health and social care organisation can promote diversity by providing a secure and accessible environment in which all the service users can be given the care they need.

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Promoting individual rights and beliefs links with anti-discriminatory practice. Discrimination means that certain individuals are treated less favourably than others because of a personal characteristic they may have. When promoting individual rights and beliefs the health and social care organisation would have to respect and understand the five rights that the service user; the right to dignity, the right to choice, the right to independence, the right to empowerment and the right to safety. The right to dignity, meaning that the service user has the right to preserve their privacy with particular information. This information can be their health status. The right to dignity can also refer to the way the service user is spoken to by a health and social care practitioner; not demeaning them in any way. The right choice means that the service user would be included in the decision that regards their care. For example; what food they should eat and what treatments they wish to have. The service user being provided this information would lead to the right to choose. The right to independence is where the service user should be allowed and encouraged to do as much for themselves as possible, if the care practitioner do everything for them, they may feel useless and not try to do things for themselves and become dependent on the care practitioner for everything. The right to empowerment is where the service user is provided with the necessary support to be able to do things for themselves, this could be the provision of aids and adaptations, training or occupational therapy, which would enable the service user to do things for themselves and to maintain their right to independence. Lastly, the right to safety is where the care service would do everything possible to protect individuals from harm.

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Confidentiality means keeping information private. It is important to keep information private, so that the service user stays safe from hazard. Confidentiality is a vital requirement for the protection of trust between service users and health and social care practitioners. The service users should be able to assume that information about their health, which they give in sureness will be kept confidential except there is a captivating reason why it should not. Service users need to trust their care practitioner and nurses have been listed as one of the most trusted among all care professionals. To maintain this status, a nurse must know how to maintain confidentiality of a service user. They are bound by a legal duty of confidence to protect personal information they may have come into contact with during the course of their work. This is not just an obligation of their contractual errands, but it is also a requirement within the common law duty of buoyancy and the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998. The DPA gives the general public the right to know what information is alleged about them and delivers an agenda to safeguard that individual information is controlled appropriately. A service user’s confidentiality and privacy rights are a serious matter in the judgments of the law. Right of entry to service user information is for the people allocated to deliver care, and is on a "need-to-know" foundation. Every care practitioner apprehends and respects the necessity for service user’s confidentiality. Advanced technology, new demands on health care, and expansions in the world-at-large has made keeping confidently difficult.

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Disclosure of a service user’s personal information is only considered legal and ethical if the service user has given full consent to the health and social care practitioner to breach confidentiality. Agreement to disclosure of information can also be indirect, once it is presumed the person in the care of a healthcare specialised understands that information may be shared within the healthcare group and is obligatory by law or be justified by motive. Consent is the endorsement or agreement for something to occur after deliberation. For consent to ...

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