Business Ethics in Healthcare

"Business Ethics in Healthcare" starts with the understanding that management is already addressing the need to ensure that the organisation is in compliance with relevant laws and regulations. This is just the start in addressing business ethics issues in healthcare organisations. As providers of high quality patient care with limited resources, management needs to be able to distinguish between the right way and the wrong way of taking cost into consideration when making decisions about patient care practices. As employers, management needs to be able to employ good criteria for determining wages and salaries. Management needs to know what it means to make fair decisions about downsizing. Management needs to know how to respond most appropriately to union organising efforts and to employee strikes. The healthcare organisation is a community service organisation. As such it has particular responsibilities to the community. How it advertises, how it disposes of medical waste, the types of mergers it enters into - these are questions of potential major impact on the community. "Business Ethics in Healthcare" offers perspectives that can assist healthcare management achieve the highest ethical standards as they face these and other issues. Leonard J. Weber suggests guidelines and criteria that are based on the understanding that the healthcare organisation is committed to patient rights, to careful stewardship of resources, to just working conditions for employee, and to service of the community.