Ethics
Our Patient Care & Intro to Radiography lab today consisted of a 3-hour round-table discussion about ethics in healthcare. We were presented with lots of scenarios regarding ethical decisions that we will be faced with in this field. A lot of these scenarios were based on situations where the patient asks you questions that you can’t really answer easily. Here’s a summarized example of one of the scenarios:
Mrs. Smith shows up in the radiology department for a post-op abdominal x-ray. She starts asking you questions like “What do you think of Dr. Jones (the surgeon) because I have heard he’s not so great and that he has a history of leaving surgical instruments inside patients? After you do her abdominal x-ray and view the images, you see a hemostat and a couple sponges that were left behind in the patient’s abdomen. You show these images to the radiologist and he requests lateral views to go along with the AP views you have already made. When you return to Mrs. Smith, she wants to know why you are having to do different views and what is wrong that you are having to do that?
The first dilemma in this scenario is how to answer Mrs. Smith’s first question about performance issues with the surgeon. It’s really a no-win situation for the tech. Lengthy discussion about this issue didn’t really lead to a definitive answer either. If you agree with Mrs. Smith, you are possibly guilty of slander. You also can’t easily tell her that Dr. Jones is working in her best interest and that he’s a great surgeon. You also can’t tell her that you saw a hemostat and sponges in her abdominal x-rays. There are some reasonable solutions to providing a response to her second set of questions though.
These situations are just difficult to handle. As a tech, our ‘tongues’ should be sort of ‘tied’ here, but you can’t just ignore a patient’s questions. Learning how to deal with this is part of the learning process…
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