Oltre l'etica clinica: il ruolo dell'etica organizzativa in ambito sanitario. Una review della letteratura

Abstract

Health ethics plays a crucial role in the activities performed by health care systems. Both the scientific and the professional literatures have usually stuck to a reductionist interpretation of health ethics, which paved the way for a focus only on clinical ethics. On the other hand, organizational ethics has been widely neglected among both scholars and practitioners. However, the recent institutional changes aimed at applying the New Public Management principles to health care, which have characterized most of health care systems in Western Countries, incite to pay an increasing attention to the organizational determinants of health ethics. From this point of view, the manuscript is intended to systematize the scientific contributions of the international scholarship in the field of organizational ethics of health care organizations, discussing the main issues which concern this topic. For this purpose, a systematic literature review has been performed, involving a total number of 206 articles collected through the citation databases “Scopus-Elsevier”, “Web of Science™” and “Pubmed”. Organizational ethics is understood as crucial to the enhancement of the social and institutional sustainability of health care organizations. Nonetheless, organizational ethics is still overlooked dealing with both the policy making and the decision making activities of health care organizations