Just like other fields, breaches of laws and ethics are not an inevitable event in the health care setting. When the breach of law and ethics happens at the helm of the health care organization, negative consequences are likely to occur. To curb this, health care organizations have to ensure that there is positive coexistence between ethics and the law within the organization. Notably, ethical codes are closely associated with statutory forces that form part of the law that provide a guideline to certain sectors. This implies that ethical codes carry the forces of law. Thus, the organization codes should provide guidelines both collectively and individually to organizations in their relationships with clients, colleagues, and the public. Organizations can achieve this by ensuring that the ethics the law exist in an organization.
Firstly, in the development of organizational, values and goals should foster respect to professional and personal value systems. The goals and values, as well as the different departments should be seen to contribute to an organization’s ethics standards positively. For instance, this can be done by ensuring that all procedures and work processes in health organization follow requirements in the provision of its services. In addition, managers and professionals within the organization should uphold ethical standards. Furthermore, knowledge of professional ethical standards is also critical in the ensuring ethics coexists with the law within the organization. This is important for competency driven organizations and is helpful in enabling top managers to have knowledge of both professional and statutory guideline of a certain profession. This creates a top level commitment to moral and ethical principles that ensure individual and collective increased focus on personal responsibility and accountability (Von Weltzien, 3-4).
Secondly, organizations develop more detailed standards of practice for the company using industry benchmarks. These standards should deal with aspects related to professional conduct. This should include interpersonal and individual behaviors. These standards have to be included in the ethics package and should address professional and take cognizance of broader social issues into account. This is greatly important in the elimination of ethical dilemma and conflict within and outside the organization. At the same time, the developed ethical code standard structure, and content need to be user friendly to ensure compliance. The ethical code should at the same time be highly dependent on the inherent organizational values that are the pursuit of everyone within the organization (Kelemen and Peltonen 157-163).
Ethical training especially at the top level of the organization is extremely important for the successful coexistence of ethics and the law. Ethical training is essential for organization employee both low cadre and managers to gain awareness of the values, ethical principles and standards of practice. The organization should place emphasis on ethical training within the organization as so as to integrate ethics into day-to-day activities of top managers, professionals, and lower cadre employees (Branstetter and Handelsman 27-30). This training is critical in making the managers and other employees that in all professional practices, every act, or decision has consequences associated with ethical issues that can also be unlawful.
Though it is apparent that codes do not carry the full force of the law, it is of paramount importance there should be positive co-existence of ethics and law within an organization. This as discussed above has a bearing on the individual and collective responsibility within an organization. Knowledge of organizational ethical code and standards, ethical training, and integration of ethical considerations in the organization’s goals and values is critical in ensuring ethics and the law co-exists within an organization.
Works Cited
Branstetter, Steven A. and Mitchell M. Handelsman. “Graduate Teaching Assistants: Ethical Training, Beliefs, and Practices.” Ethics & Behavior 10.1 (2000): 27-50. Print.
Kelemen, Mihaela and Tuomo Peltonen. “Ethics, morality and the subject: the contribution of Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Foucault to & postmodern business ethics.” Scand. J. Mgmt. 17. 2 (2001): 151-166. Print.
Von Weltzien, Hoivik Heidi “Professional Ethics – a Management Opportunity in emerging organizations.” Journal of Business Ethics 39.1/2 (2002): 2–11. Print.