Ethical Issues In Health And Social Care Essay

When face with difficult ethical decisions in the day to day or during an emergency, the choice is not always easy. In a first hand published account, Dr. Grubb clearly shows the gray space and difficultly ethical decisions can be:

It started like any other day. An older man was brought to the hospital following multiple fainting episodes and falls. He was found to be in complete heart block, and a temporary cardiac pacemaker was place. […] But the device started failing to reliably maintain his heart rate, so he was quickly brought up to the operating area for a permanent pacemaker insertion. […] It was a routine case, just like the numerous ones I had done before. Then it happened. The sound of an explosion suddenly erupted through the operating

Grubb’s actions make him a hero or a villain? While Dr. Grubb’s setting was a medical situation, the ethical decisions during any critical situations rarely allow a clean answer and this also applies to businesses and safety professionals. As the world continues to advance, industrial disasters have greater consequences, requiring better handling and ethical decisions making. While the goal of safety professional is to prevent these disasters from ever happening, nothing is ever foolproof. It falls onto safety professionals to prepare company senior management and leadership on how to handle these events ethical to promote safety of employees and the environment. In order to gain a better idea into how this can be done, this essay will discuss ethic in the safety profession, key factors of ethical leadership and decision-making, key factors of developing a safety culture, environmental consideration during an emergency situation. By discussing these four areas, this essay hopes to display the importance of emergency evacuation based on ethical decision making for the environment and the development of a safety-first corporate

But the question of ‘what is ethical’ is far more complicated then right or wrong. In the case of Zoubek’s article on “Ethics & the SH&E Professional”, the author brakes down the ethical dilemmas that safety profession face into two categories: right versus wrong and right versus right (Zoubek, 2014). Right versus wrong is pretty straight forward, if it hurts somebody or if its against the law, its wrong. It is the right versus right dilemmas where the gray areas start to arise. Zoubek uses the following examples as common right versus right dilemmas: truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, short-term versus long-term, and justice versus mercy (Zoubek, 2014). Traits such as truth, loyalty, justice, and mercy are all things that define a “good” person. But when those traits are pinned against each other, which one is more virtuous? In ethical dilemmas, it comes down to several key factors to help the safety professional and company leadership to weight the outcome of their