ETHICS AND COMMUNITY IN THE HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONS docx

[...]... complaint only makes sense if the complainant is saying that the rules, as they stand and are accurately interpreted, do not serve the pursuit of his or her personal objective As such, the objectives of the complainant and the association no longer coincide, and the complainant has every right to leave The complainant has no right to demand a change in the rules against the will of other members 16 THE HEALTH. .. human in medical ethics is witnessed most forcefully in relation to the recent and ongoing developments in genetics explored in this volume by Ruth Chadwick and Kim Petrie in chapter 6 What then are the implications of this discursive perspective for health care ethics and for the making of ethical judgements in situations such as that facing the father in the example at the start of this introduction?... shared values and projects, and rather more on their diversity The power of this emphasis on the needs and interests of individuals lies in its recognition that any workable understanding of the moral world must relate in a meaningful way to the actual decisions with which individual people are confronted in their everyday lives That is, to the moral concerns of real people such as the father in the example... susceptible to analysis in terms of individuals To see this is to perceive the importance for moral thinking of the other arm of the dilemma facing the father in the example above, that is, the value of the family or the community which communitarians claim is not expressible in individual terms Community Avineri and de Shalit 9 argue that communitarianism has two aspects The first of these is, as I have... begin to recognise the particular value of the engagement of people in the negotiation of the meaning of their own lives and the nature of their relations with those around them, with those who constitute their communities or families This suggests that rather than adopting the now traditional top-down principalist approach to health care ethics, the subtlety and the significance of ethical dilemmas in. .. had in mind as the kind of context of public negotiation of meaning in which the possibility of Setting Limits might be seen as one which enhances the meaning of old age rather than demeaning it 23 By ruling out such questions in advance of ethics individualists and communitarians rule out the possibility of health care ethics itself The centrality of the question of what it means to be human in medical... such as the applicability of theoretical frameworks, as in this volume, or the nature of the profession Other volumes examine issues relevant to particular professions, including those which have hitherto received little attention, such as health care management and general practice x INTRODUCTION Health care ethics: liberty, community or participation? Michael Parker In their book The Patient in the Family... means that they tend to explain moral problems such as that experienced by the father in the example above in terms of the competing needs and interests of such individuals and they have, as a consequence, a tendency to focus on the differences between people, the variety of their needs and values, and their separateness That is, they concentrate rather less upon what people have in common; their similarities,... between the values of patient-centred medicine and those which sustain families and communities reflects an ongoing and important contemporary debate in health care ethics and in ethics more widely between individualistic approaches and those which have come to be known as communitarian It is the aim of this book both to reflect this debate and to explore its implications for the health care professions and. .. good of the individual patient has distorted the ways in which family members interact with one another and in particular with those who are sick They argue that at times of stress families often adopt the individualistic values of the medical world and this leads them unintentionally to trample on the values and concerns which sustain families On the other hand, they argue that families in their adherence . genetic counselling • Health care decision-making for elderly patients Ethics and Community in the Health Care Professions provides an accessible introduction to, and. ETHICS AND COMMUNITY IN THE HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONS Recently debate about the relationship between individual and community has become central to the