How to Define the Ethical Principles

The chair of the hospital’s Ethics Committee has asked you to develop a policy for treating patients on methadone who need an organ transplant.  As a first step, she has asked you to frame the ethical dilemma by determining which ethical principles apply to each problem the committee is considering.

This step-by-step guide will help you work through determining the applicable ethical issues and documenting your thoughts using the template Dr. Jones provided.

1. Meet with your team and pick a team leader.

• You may want to review the General Skills Resources for information on successfully forming a team.
  

2. Review Dr. Jones’s email. You may want to print the email and highlight the important points.

3. Download the Relevant Ethical Principles template. Notice that the problems on the template are the same as those outlined in Dr. Jones’ email, as she pre-populated the table for you with the various components of the dilemma to be considered.

4. Review the available resources. Click on the resources link above to see what information is available to help you as you do your work.

5. Download the attachment Decision Making in Transplant Cases. Review the document for background information on how doctors make decisions regarding patients who need transplants.

6. Determine the ethical principles that apply to each problem.

   1. Download Ethical Principles for Consideration from the email. Review the document carefully and familiarize yourself with each principle. 

   2. Review each component of the ethical dilemma outlined in the template. As you think about each issue think through the ethical principles and ask yourself, “Which of these principles are relevant to this issue?” You should also consider who might be affected by that principle. Instead of simply labeling each problem with an ethical principle you need to describe why you think that principle applies and who it might affect. For example, if you think justice is applicable, you might say "Justice applies because giving an organ to a former drug addict isn't fair to someone who has never taken drugs."

   3. Record your ideas in the “Ethical Principles” column of your template.

7. Check your work. Before submitting your work, take a moment for detailed review.
   
   
   1. Do you understand the set of issues the committee is facing in this case?
      
      
   2. Did you consider and then document if and how each problem/issue in your template relates to each of the following ethical principles:
      1. Respect, including autonomy, fidelity, confidentiality, truth and honesty?
      2. Beneficence?
      3. Nonmaleficence?
      4. Justice?
         
         
   3. Did you explain the effects of each principle and to whom it may apply?
   
   
   4. Did your team create one document that represents the ideas and effort of each team member?
      
      
8. Submit your work to the mentor.

Review the checklist on the Submit Your Work section of this task and submit the relevant documents to your mentor.

What is Ethics? This short paper answers the question, "what is ethics?" and provides an overview of how it's used.

Gaining an Ethical Perspective: Gaining the proper perspective on a situation is the first step in solving in any ethical dilemma. This paper explains how to go about gaining that perspective.