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Competency and Informed consent in Healthcare Setting

In Kipnis article, the moral lesson that he is addressing the application of ethics in a healthcare environment is competency as well as informed consent. According to Kipnis, patient competence tends to be an indispensable component of the doctor to the patient connection. The case report presented in this article is about a Korean man who is old and is bedridden in a Hawaiian hospital. The patient refused to be treated centering his arguments by mistaken beliefs or facts concerning his doctors and the mode of treatment (Kipnis, p.59). Therefore this old man’s case relates to competency and also it is prolonged towards the informed consent, self-sufficiency and also paternalism. From an ethics of care viewpoint, it is quite vivid that the older Korean patient seems to exist as not wholly competent, and moreover, if he exists as not entirely competent, thus his case can be justified to be characterized with soft and fragile paternalism.

Therefore the moral lesson derived from his case is that there is the necessity for the medical practitioners when providing care to the patient to not always take paternalism and informed consent, relatively the patient should be given some comfort through proper ethics consultations. The patient who was knowns as Bruce was not competent about his medical condition and his lack of competence can be described from the fact that he possesses some mistaken beliefs regarding the doctors (Kipnis, p.62). Also, he had a planned intrusion that the Japanese doctors sought to kill him and thus the treatment that he was undergoing was designed to accomplish this. His mistaken beliefs tilted his competency of properly and rationally engaging with his decisions correctly.

Works Cited

Kipnis, Kenneth. “The Certified Clinical Ethics Consultant”. HEC Forum, 2009. Springer Nature America, Inc, doi:10.1007/s10730-009-9107-8.