Health Care Professional Essay Example
When I wrote the book Public Virtues [1], I included professionalism among the virtues that characterize our current era. I believed that professionalism was a value on the rise and was highly regarded in societies where knowledge had and would continue to play an increasingly crucial role. Nonetheless, my view of professionalism as a virtue was formulated more that fifteen years ago and with a question mark.Health Care Professional Essay Example My reasoning was based on the feeling that the sense of professionalism most commonly exhibited these days is far being what we could consider a moral virtue. More and more, the concept of a good professional tends to be linked to that of an expert, a person who is competent in a certain field of knowledge, and not the ideal of a person who is committed to and morally responsible for the functions or activities they carry out. I am speaking of something I wrote some time ago, as I mentioned before. If I bring it up now, running the risk of sounding immodest by beginning this reflection by quoting myself, it is only to corroborate that I maintain my point of view as expressed then. Indeed, the common popular definition of professionalism, or even of professional excellence, regardless of the profession in question, is related to scientific and technical competence, to possessing knowledge and set of specific skills and abilities. A good professional is, above all, an expert; not a person who is morally committed to what they do and, by extension, to society as a whole.
This definition of professionalism-or professional excellence, which is really the same-reveals the reduction ism and simplification typical of a world that judges a person’s behavior more on its results than on the principles they should follow and serve. In a way, professionalism is equivalent to a job well done. However, the concept of work has also been reduced to a certain technical skill, a practical ability, which does not go beyond doing things materially well. A good architect should design buildings that do not fall down; a good engineer should build bridges that do not collapse: a good teacher should know how to pass on knowledge to their students; a good doctor is one that can correctly diagnose and treat patients. In any case, having the necessary scientific and technical competence is, undoubtedly, the first moral duty of a professional. However it is not the only one, as professional responsibility requires something more. It requires more in all professions, regardless of their projection and social density, but particularly in those whose aim and purpose is the quality of human life, such as the healthcare professions. In this article, I intend to define the elements of this moral plus required of professional excellence in general and, particularly, in the healthcare field. Health Care Professional Essay Example
It is not difficult, in principle, to assign a plus of moral excellence to healthcare professions. Medicine was the first profession to create a code of ethics, in a time when the profession did not even exist as such. The Hippocratic oath [2] does not only lay out medical prohibitions, it is also a personal code of conduct derived from the concept of medicine as an “art” (techné) based upon observation and specific cases. The Hippocratic texts, in theory, shape a physician’s ethos, their method. This behavior must focus not only on the patient’s best interests, but also on upholding the physician’s reputation and that of the profession. Due to the complexity of the art in question, this behavior must take into account all those affected.
Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.
(Hippocratic Treatises, “Aphorisms”)
Chinese philosopher Confucius wrote: “Medicine is a human art”. It should not be understood only as a means to cure, but as a moral commitment to preventing all avoidable suffering. A practice based on love and respect for others that, as in the Hippocratic oath, should be ruled by the principle of not harming and doing good, respecting patients without discrimination. More than a practice based on laws, Confucius and his followers understood medicine as a practice based on the cultivation of virtue, which, in turn, is nurtured by feelings such as piety, shame and respect.
We should treat the patients as our mothers.
(Tianchen Li, Ming Dynasty)
Whoever comes to seek cure must be treated like your own relatives regardless of their social status, family economic conditions, appearances, ages, races, and mental abilities.
(Simiao Sun, Tang Dynasty) [3]
Since such ideas were written twenty five hundred years ago, in general, the goal of medicine has not changed. On one hand, the patient must be cared for, preserved from harm, avoiding corruption and injustice. On the other hand, a good collaborative relationship with other members of the profession must be established. Although Hippocrates had already mentioned that one of a physician’s aims is to preserve their good reputation, it was Thomas Percival (1740-1804), a philosopher and physician famous for his moral tales for children and author of codes of medical ethics, who stressed the need to go beyond individual actions in professional practice. In his view, a professional must be able to put the patient’s interests and those of the general public before their own. The positive public image of medical practice is as important as dedication to the patient.Health Care Professional Essay Example
The theory is rarely questioned, but practice is still a long way from truly reflecting this. In real life, scientific excellence does not always go hand in hand with ethical excellence because personal interests take precedence over general interests or the interests of others. The dangers of medical practice laid out in the great classics of medical deontology are exacerbated as the profession becomes more commercial and knowledge more specialized and technical. Max Weber (1864-1920), in his theory of the profession, a term he compared to “vocation”, warned of the first of these threats. The word Beruf, used by Weber to refer to different human occupations or activities, can mean both “divine calling” and “human profession”. The idea came from Luther in his translation of the Bible, where he compared contemplative monastic life, which he himself held in low esteem, to professional life in order to highlight the importance of the latter as an explicit expression of love for one’s neighbor. The duality of profession and vocation allows Weber to express the loss of vocational spirit in human activities, reducing them to mere professions in which bureaucracy and profit seeking inhibit any other purpose. This is yet another aspect of the disenchantment of the world which he refers to throughout his work. Linked to the idea of vocation, to the idea of commitment or mission, a profession requires dedication to its own ends, which should go beyond private interests. However, despite the theory, Weber [4] regrets that earning money has become the goal of professions; that accumulation of wealth has become an end in and of itself. It seems that our capitalist system and the economic subordination of all activities make it impossible to recover professional ethics. In the end, everything is a business. Health Care Professional Essay Example
Similar to Weber, American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) [5], referring specifically to medicine, insists that this profession should be understood as “an ideology of service” and not as pure business, since it deals with a social problem such as health. Undoubtedly, both cases postulate an idealized professionalism, which is driven by altruism rather than profitability. This idealization is a far cry from reality, but should perhaps be maintained as an ideal if we want to discuss a professional excellence that is not limited to material aspects but encompasses a clear moral dimension. Beyond rhetorical idealizations, the concept of vocation that is implicit and inseparable from that of profession would always take into account Weber’s final conclusions in his splendid lecture “Politics as a Vocation” [6]. In these conclusions, he demanded that politicians-and, by extension, anyone who feels called to do something interesting in this word-know how to set their own limits when prevented by circumstance from maintaining ethical principles.
However, it is immensely moving when a mature man -no matter whether old or young in years- is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: “Here I stand; I can do no other.”
(Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”).
In addition to the reigning materialism and economism, yet another aspect has come to distort, in our time, the sense of professional excellence we would like to maintain even if only as a regulatory idea: what Ortega denounced as “specialism” Health Care Professional Essay Example [7] when referring to the one-dimensional of scientific and technical knowledge. It so happens that, in this case, we face an obstacle that is not only unavoidable but also necessary for the development of knowledge. Only specialization and division allow knowledge to progress. On the other hand, however, the moral dimension that should be inextricably linked with professional excellence is closer to humanistic knowledge than to that of a pure scientist. In the case of healthcare professionals, their aim goes beyond mere “diagnosis and treatment”, as philosopher Hans George Gadamer [8] explains. The professional is not only required to have sound scientific knowledge, but should also know how to “restore” harmony, to “treat” a human being, to “help” them live differently, to “advise”. Another widely read sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, regrets that we are living in a society of experts, which in itself is unfit to cope with a complex world [9]. In such a society, the “person as a whole” is seldom deserving of attention: we are organs whose functions require care.
Health depends on many different factors and the final goal is not so much regaining health itself as enabling patients once again to enjoy the role they had previously fulfilled in their everyday lives.
Hans George Gadamer, The Enigma of Health.
The “specialism” denounced by Ortega, the scientific obsession derived from a positivism that requires proof (evidence) and figures, lead C.P. Snow [10], more than fifty years ago, to call for the fusion of the two cultures: humanist and scientific. These two cultures were born and developed in unison, although they were later so definitively separated as to make communication between the two nearly impossible. In a way, the birth of bioethics responds to the need to recover the lost unity between science and humanities. A unity without which, in the words of Wittgenstein, the most vital questions remain un-posed.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [11]
Professions nowadays have become, in short, well or poorly executed “careers”. To have a successful professional career has become synonymous with success in a profession, which itself is synonymous with achieving a level of excellence that, frequently, is equivalent to getting rich. Success today is more related to money, fame and material success than to excellence derived from good practice, which is not always acknowledged by society or the profession itself.Health Care Professional Essay Example
In short, the commodification of the profession, which impedes us from looking beyond mere private material interest, and the technical reductionism derived from knowledge specialization are two great obstacles to healthcare professionals acquiring and implementing a moral dimension in their work. Without it, the two goals set by both ancient and modern classics of medical deontology will be missed: patient welfare and cooperation in building a positive image of the profession. Professional ethos, if reduced to a mere mercantile and bureaucratic ethos, does not cultivate the values or virtues that healthcare practice should display. Marañón [12] wrote that physicians did not need to be trained in ethics because their vocation would lead them naturally to behave virtuously from a moral point of view. But Marañón was mistaken in this particular aspect because, just as has happened in other professions, including the most highly renowned (which used to include medicine, in addition to priesthood and judgeship), healthcare professional have lost their vocational dimension or, at least, said dimension has been inhibited by other more pressing or attractive needs and interests. Other interests, it should also be said, that are more highly renowned and applauded by society. However we look at it, it seems difficult to speak of excellence without assigning this word a moral significance. The term “excellence”, as I will explain shortly, comes from the Greek areté, which can be translated as “virtue” or “excellence of a thing”. Thus, if we want to recover the idea of professional excellence, we must analyze which virtues, which qualities, define said excellence. The next section is devoted to this topic. Health Care Professional Essay Example