The Ethical Life of Health Care Organizations

Abstract

Institutions have ethical lives and characters just as their individual members do. Health care organizations must look critically at how professed institutional values can best be realized in day‐to‐day interactions within the institution and with the wider community.

Organizational ethics and social justice in practice: Choices and challenges in a rural-urban health region

“…CHES offers many of the expected forms of ethics support, including clinical ethics consultation, ethics education, policy development and review, and research ethics. 1 However, the way in which these services are organized is somewhat different. Ethics education, policy development and review (Policy D & R), and clinical ethics consultation each function as a separate component with their own coordinator.…”

Values Based Decision Making: Organizational Mission and Integrity

“…To navigate these decisions in ways that respect the organization's mission to the greatest extent possible requires advanced planning regarding the process for assessing options. 5 How to make decisions in light of real world conflicts and resource limitations is an essential aspect of VBDM. It is one thing to be able to identify in the abstract what an organization's mission calls it to do in an ideal world.…”

“…To limit the use of VBDM to only certain aspects of an organization's life or to decisions made only at particular levels of the organization results in an organization that possesses only partial integrity. In the words of Stanley Reiser, such an organization is ethically bifurcated (5). Finally, successfully to implement VBDM to achieve and maintain organizational integrity, an organization must develop a process for navigating conflicts among the possible decisions its mission may call it to make in particular cases.…”

The Importance of Management for Understanding Managed Care

“…As with any institutional arrangement, one can ask whether the guiding purposes of MCOs are ethically sound and whether their organizational structure promotes defensible ethical goals (Reiser, 1994). MCOs are complex organizations and their impact on American health care has been so remarkably rapid and extensive (Jensen et al, 1997) that understanding their operative logic is imperative.…”