Moral Integrity & Ethical Decisions

Advocating for the underlying patients is an obligation of healthcare professionals. In conjunction with this analogy, there are specific ethical values that are appropriate for the workers in the mental health, acute care facilities, and long-term care, whereas other values are effective for these workers’ superiors. Invariably, the most outstanding moral values of the workers include justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, confidentiality, and substantial respect regarding the underlying patient autonomy (Gabel, 2011). Additionally, the employees in the healthcare settings are linked to other moral values, including empathy, modesty, fortitude, patience, and affability. On the other hand, the superiors in the same settings have a correlation with several moral properties – gratitude, dignity, friendliness, fairness, and honor.

The workers’ moral values target at ensuring a strong and beneficial relationship between the healthcare employees and the patients with whom they interact in the care provision process whereas the superiors’ values target at offering an effective management practice to substantiate provision of optimum patient safety and care in the healthcare facilities. Nonetheless, both professionals and their superiors exhibit the value of respect since the patients should show optimum gratitude to their patients irrespective of the patients’ social classes while the superiors should portray substantial respect to their workers for the effective operation of the chain of command. For instance, the workers should not give the rich patients the first priority of treatment following their abundance of wealth compared to the financially oppressed patients. Instead, all patients should encounter a fair and equitable treatment process in the healthcare setting. Additionally, the workers have the obligation of conserving confidentiality regarding the privacy of the patients’ personal data. However, this value still touches on the superiors since they also have to preserve their patients’ personal information and prevent unauthorized access to the data by third parties (Ulrich et al., 2010). Modesty enables the workers not to assume anything while evaluating the potentials of the patients while affability entails handling the patients in a friendly manner. These values enable the workers to create an environment wherein the patients can share their healthcare needs with the care professionals and achieve optimum care. For instance, a man suffering from mental disorder will hardly disclose his feelings to a therapist when the mood is not friendly.