With regard to targeting different categories of patients with mailing lists, it raises an ethical issue in that the complementary services are using information about a patients’ medical history in order to advertise their products to them and offer miracle cures. It may mean the patient is drawn away from appropriate medical therapy in order to pursue the complementary medicine, which may lead to further illness.
Ethical Issues raised by not accepting the offer:
Patients have the right to have access to all forms of therapies, which may help them overcome illnesses. Although the complementary services have not yet been proven they could cure many patients, which orthodox medicines cannot cure. An ethical issue is raised here as can the IT company deprive patients from potential cures to illness?
As mentioned previously if doctors are offered incentives to accept the feature it is in fact bribery, but if this incentive benefited the welfare of the patients is it unethical to take the chance away from patients to learn about other forms of cures and potentially benefit from them.
Preparing to deal with the problem
After having looked at the ethical issues involved I next need to prepare myself in order to ensure I deal with the problem as effectively as possible. I will carry out the following in order to ensure I am fully prepared:
Talk to doctors and gain a view on their opinions of the complementary medicines.
Carry out research into the company who are marketing the health related products. Attempt to find out if they are a genuine company concerned with helping others, or who seem to be more concerned with making profit.
Investigate how patients would feel about the feature appearing on their documents and research into whether they have ever had any experiences with complementary medicines.
Attempt to find out which decision the majority would be most happy with, including everyone who would be affected by the change, the IT company, doctors, patients, staff at the health centre and also the health company themselves.
Proposing and justifying a solution
As the decision maker for this problem I have decided to partly implement the feature into our system and leave out some of the proposed ventures. I feel that patients should be aware of other forms of medicine and treatment that could potentially aid their recovery. Therefore I suggest that the company wishing to market health related products produce a series of booklets and informational leaflets outlining the services they offer. These leaflets will than be made available to patients at the health centre so they can look at them if they wish, and not be pressured into it. By adopting the utilitarian approach I aim to please as many people as possible by making the information available but not exploiting the vulnerability of patients at the same time.
