Promoting ethics across the healthcare sector: what can codes achieve?
Access status:
Open Access
Type
ArticleAbstract
Over the course of the twentieth century, numerous national and international ethics “codes” have been developed. While such codes serve important substantive and symbolic functions, they can also pose challenges. In this article, we discuss these challenges, noting that they fall ...
See moreOver the course of the twentieth century, numerous national and international ethics “codes” have been developed. While such codes serve important substantive and symbolic functions, they can also pose challenges. In this article, we discuss these challenges, noting that they fall into four main categories relating to conceptual tensions, power imbalances, organisational barriers, and threats of exploitation. We illustrate these challenges using examples provided from the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UDBHR). We emphasise the importance of accountability in the development and maintenance of national and international codes and argue that, despite all their challenges, codes provide an important common language among otherwise disparate and sometimes adversarial groups, and provide visible and explicit sets of standards that may be invoked by community members to criticise and hold powerful bodies to account. This is particularly important for practitioners and researchers who belong to organisations that are signatories to codes, who can use these codes to both guide and justify ethical behaviour in the face of competing organisational, professional and political imperatives.
See less
See moreOver the course of the twentieth century, numerous national and international ethics “codes” have been developed. While such codes serve important substantive and symbolic functions, they can also pose challenges. In this article, we discuss these challenges, noting that they fall into four main categories relating to conceptual tensions, power imbalances, organisational barriers, and threats of exploitation. We illustrate these challenges using examples provided from the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UDBHR). We emphasise the importance of accountability in the development and maintenance of national and international codes and argue that, despite all their challenges, codes provide an important common language among otherwise disparate and sometimes adversarial groups, and provide visible and explicit sets of standards that may be invoked by community members to criticise and hold powerful bodies to account. This is particularly important for practitioners and researchers who belong to organisations that are signatories to codes, who can use these codes to both guide and justify ethical behaviour in the face of competing organisational, professional and political imperatives.
See less
Date
2020Source title
Internal Medicine JournalVolume
50Issue
11Publisher
Royal Australasian College of PhysiciansLicence
Copyright All Rights ReservedRights statement
This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Lipworth, W., Kerridge, I., Montgomery, K. and Komesaroff, P.A. (2020), Promoting ethics across the healthcare sector: what can codes achieve?. Intern Med J, 50: 1333-1338., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/imj.15051. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.Faculty/School
Faculty of Medicine and Health, Sydney Health EthicsShare