Ethics
The Heart of Health Care
Chapter One
Growing Pains
Introduction
Will we ever attain ethically sensitive health care?
As things stand:
1 Health care lacks a coherent philosophy of purpose.
2 Beneath the surface, different rationales compete for ascendancy.
3 Many practitioners recognise that health care is more than medical therapy.
4 However, the great bulk of health care remains medically focused.
5 Overburdened with technical tasks, most health professionals rarely catch more than
a fleeting glimpse of the richer possibilities.
If we are ever going to do better than this we must openly acknowledge that health
care is fundamentally a moral task.
In the midst of crisis
The health world is so conceptually disoriented it seems it may never achieve its moral
potential. Mostly we just bumble along - continually troubled by territorial squabbles
and inadequate resources - blind to the intellectual challenge that must be met if health
work is to become all ... read full excerpt from Ethics: The Heart of Health Care ebook
